Windows Weekly 990 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. We have lots to talk about. Paul has some thoughts about rewriting Notepad. The title might give you some idea. We'll also talk about why Microsoft quietly extended the Life for Windows 10. And a little bit about expensive hardware. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:00:21]:
It's the topic of the week. This week on Windows Weekly.

Leo Laporte [00:00:38]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Episode 990, recorded Wednesday, July 1, 2026. Don't be nostalgic for stupid. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft. And here we are, our softies of the hour, Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Paul is, of course, from thurrott.com. Richard's from net.rocks and runasradio.com and together they form the dynamic duo of Microsoft journalism.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:13]:
I don't know how dynamic we are, but yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:01:17]:
One of you is Batman. One of you is Robin. I'll let you decide.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:21]:
The other one is Batgirl. You figure it out.

Leo Laporte [00:01:23]:
You figure it out. Hello, gentlemen.

Richard Campbell [00:01:27]:
Hey.

Leo Laporte [00:01:27]:
Richard's back home, which is nice.

Richard Campbell [00:01:29]:
Been home for a while. It's been a few weeks in a row.

Leo Laporte [00:01:32]:
Oh, has it? Oh, I guess I wasn't paying attention.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:34]:
It's weird.

Leo Laporte [00:01:36]:
Paul is. Well, home is where the heart is, and so he's at home in Makunji.

Richard Campbell [00:01:41]:
Yep. Where the property ownership is. But now he owns in both places.

Leo Laporte [00:01:46]:
So what do you do, actually? Do you own in Makunji now?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:50]:
Yeah, we do.

Leo Laporte [00:01:51]:
Oh, you bought one, huh? Good for you.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:54]:
Yeah, we were renting it originally, but.

Leo Laporte [00:01:56]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [00:01:58]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:01:58]:
Somebody doing well with the subscriptions at the. Right. That's all I can say.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:04]:
Probably has more to do with Stephanie than me, but I. No, it's like I said, Stephanie, last year, sometime I was. Or whenever this was, I was like, you know, we're spending a lot more time in Mexico than we are in Pennsylvania. We should buy a place in Pennsylvania.

Leo Laporte [00:02:18]:
The logic of homelessness.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:19]:
Expecting her to explain why that was ridiculous. And she's like, I was thinking the same thing.

Leo Laporte [00:02:24]:
Oh, my God.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:25]:
Okay, I've inflicted you with something that's terrible.

Leo Laporte [00:02:28]:
Careful. Well, that's good. Now, you have homes in both places and you have children, so it'll all work out. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:34]:
I have infinite money, obviously, as I keep telling my daughter, who refuses not to be in school.

Leo Laporte [00:02:41]:
Meanwhile, my bitcoin wallet's locked and the value's plummeting.

Richard Campbell [00:02:45]:
Nice.

Leo Laporte [00:02:47]:
I watched it go up. Now I'm watching it go down.

Richard Campbell [00:02:50]:
That's how that works.

Leo Laporte [00:02:52]:
That's not what we're here to talk about today. Today we have gathered together, dearly beloved, to discuss Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:03]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:03:03]:
What's the latest? Paul?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:05]:
That was, that sounded an awful lot like a, like a wake or a funeral.

Leo Laporte [00:03:08]:
It could be. Or a wedding. It's a wake or a wedding. One or the other.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:12]:
Well, it's the husband. No, it's celebration. Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:03:19]:
Last week was so busy with Windows, I wouldn't be surprised if this week would just be quiet.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:23]:
It was quieter. But by the way, part of the reason is literally today as we record this, it's July 1st, right. I can't say the date but you.

Richard Campbell [00:03:32]:
Fiscal year.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:32]:
This is the beginning of the fiscal year. So we've been on kind of a death knell watch for a little while, meaning like three years. But a lot about Xbox, but just Microsoft in general and personal tech in general too, I guess because obviously a lot of layoffs and then in the scheme of things with Xbox game closures, studio closures, you know, et cetera.

Richard Campbell [00:03:54]:
So my LinkedIn feed has been filled with retirements.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:58]:
Just filled. I. I've been getting emailed from people and it's interesting someone. This is from some, I think it's like an internal Microsoft email thread. But it was the basically the kind of takeaway I had a year ago build like so a year ago May when I was out there and it was all this terribleness going on and they had done a series of really poorly done layoffs, including a set right before build opened where it was so bad that there were people who were supposed to man booths at the show would gone, you know, and they never, yeah, no one thought to figure out,

Richard Campbell [00:04:30]:
you know, they laid off everyone from a booth like we were there. It's like that booth never got built and it's because that group didn't exist.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:37]:
Exactly. So they've learned some lessons since then. So one of the things we've seen this year is that they offered certain employees who've been there a long time and have accrued a lot of whatever points they have, you know, Microsoft points or something, achievements, whatever they are, you know, they use their Microsoft rewards points and they can take an early retirement and whatever and apparently that's been very successful. Microsoft has not to my knowledge ever said what percentage of that group, but it was at least 30% of them, at 33%, something like that, which was their goal. And that worked out. And so one of the rumors, we'll call it for now, because we don't know, is that when Microsoft does announce layoffs, apparently next week now, it will be a smaller number than anticipated because they got enough people to kind of voluntarily go. And so we'll see, we'll see what happens there. But I do feel like last week, a little bit every day this week so far, absolutely kind of sense of dread in the morning for me and I don't even work there.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:36]:
I'm kind of braced for the bad. Microsoft lowers the boom kind of news each morning and it hasn't happened yet.

Richard Campbell [00:05:43]:
Well, I certainly heard a lot of reorg conversation going on too. So things are being moved around. There seems to be, it's like the frost giants are hurling stones at each other. Like there's lightning bolts up at the upper echelons and, and, and the, the folks further down are being pushed about as the.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:03]:
Everybody loves to be evaluated. Everyone loves to be found lacking because of some arbitrary new rule that, you know, you have to get rid of x percent of people or whatever the heck it is.

Richard Campbell [00:06:11]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:12]:
There was one person who had said, which is something I had sort of written maybe a year and a half ago, whatever that was. Like, it's kind of worse being there and not knowing what's going to happen, that it would be just to get laid off, you know, like at least that there's some certain.

Richard Campbell [00:06:25]:
I've certainly seen people doing retirement that way. It's like I might get laid off, I might not. I'm going to control my des and you can get the hell out of here.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:32]:
Yeah, right. Yeah. And I think Gigwire published a story maybe today or yesterday that was kind of the tattoo. Some, some older guys who were at Microsoft for a long time were like, look, I just, I was happy to be able to pull the trigger on my own schedule, you know, sort of my own schedule, at least of my own volition anyway.

Richard Campbell [00:06:49]:
So self determination has some power to it.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:51]:
Yeah, it's too bad that we even have to talk about this. But you know, 220,000 employees, this is not the, this is not a thin, light machine.

Richard Campbell [00:07:01]:
It's a fraction of the size of Amazon. But then they have warehouses.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:05]:
Yeah, I mean most of those employees are drivers and warehouse people. Anyhow, as far as actual news, since we don't have anything to say there yet, actually. Oh, I meant to look this up. So remember some time ago I had mentioned that last fall was sometime I said, you know, it's weird we haven't heard from Phil Spencer in a while, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:07:25]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:25]:
And it's like. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I did not look this up. So maybe I'm wrong, but Pavan Davalori, who runs Windows, started a podcast, had one episode. Did he ever make another one? I don't actually know. I don't know that I don't. I meant to look this up this morning. I forgot.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:40]:
I'm not saying he's gone. I'm sure he's still around, but, like. Yeah, in the sense that it's easy to start anything. The trick is keeping it going. He says, looking at. Two gentlemen have been doing podcasts for over 20 years. You know, that there's some skill or whatever you want to call it into doing the thing. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:58]:
So we'll see.

Richard Campbell [00:08:00]:
Presumably, he went down to, you know, building 25 and used the facilities that are already set up and good to go, but that doesn't necessarily mean you can make the time to do it. Plus, there's always the question of his PR team decided this was a good idea. He did one, and when he came out of it, he says, I'm never doing that again.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:17]:
Yeah, that could be. He doesn't seem.

Richard Campbell [00:08:19]:
He doesn't have all those experiences with folks.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:21]:
Yeah, yeah. He's not super into the spotlight. You can kind of tell that. But that's kind of what I like about him. You know, generally speaking, that group, not him necessarily, but the whole group, and then Xbox, same thing under Ayesha Sharma, have been very good about, you know, communicating what they're doing and providing little monthly recaps. Okay. Here's all the stuff we fixed in Windows this month, et cetera. It has, you know, it's been a nice little, you know, couple of months, I guess we'll call it, so far.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:46]:
So I think he should make more videos, but I guess we'll see.

Richard Campbell [00:08:50]:
Yeah. It also depends on how glib you are and how much scripting you want to do there. You know, people pick up on the authenticity in that space. So maybe you're better at written, you know, but that's more your style.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:02]:
Yeah. So the format of the first one, which might be the only one, again I have to look, was with an interview with Marcus Ash, who was a great guy. And I feel like just doing that sort of thing where you're a. You're letting people who were doing some work get out in front of people, which is nice.

Richard Campbell [00:09:19]:
Right. It's always good when some leadership puts somebody in front of somebody. Right?

Paul Thurrott [00:09:23]:
Yep. I think that's. I think that's great. So I just, you could just do it like that. He doesn't have to be the one that communicates, hey, we did it, we won, you know, mission accomplished, whatever. But I, yeah, just. If you just do it just for that reason, I think it'd be good, you know. So, yeah, okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:41]:
Actual news. And interestingly, this occurred without any announcement whatsoever on Microsoft's part. You would have thought that this would have been a big, big deal. But sometime in the past week or so, they silently updated the page they have on the Microsoft website For the Windows 10 Extended Security Updates page, whatever program, and they changed the date. Someone just went in and edited the year. So instead of ending in October of this year, it's now going to end on October 13, 20. Actually now it's October 12, 2027. So this is my problem with them

Richard Campbell [00:10:18]:
doing this quietly is you wonder if it's a typo.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:21]:
Well, well, as I. So as I said that, I was thinking almost the same thing, except that now I realized they actually had to change two parts of it because the original date was October 13, 2026. Now it's October 12, 2027. So it seems purposeful. I did do one of those way back machine things to see when it changed. The most recent one I could see that still had the old date was in May. So sometime this past month. But yay.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:50]:
I mean, so that's great. And just so people don't understand what this means or don't remember or whatever, if you have a Windows 10 PC and you either did not update to Windows 11 for your own reasons or it just does not qualify. Microsoft offered to consumers for the first time the ability to get extended support. I think they were originally planning to charge for it. They got some negative feedback on that and just decided to do it for free for a year now. They've been doing this for businesses over several Windows versions now, probably for up to three years, where they escalate the cost year by year, which makes it perfectly expensive toward the end. But this is the first time they've ever offered this to consumers. Of course, when you hear this A, you're like the initial reaction, oh, that's great, that's a really good idea.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:33]:
And then you're like, well, hold on a second, what's going on here? Why, what's happening? And if they're going to be shipping these updates to businesses anyway, why wouldn't you just let people keep getting the updates too? I mean, what's the difference? But I mean, those updates are there, right? And then of course Just the whole, are we really ready for this thing? I mean, as we were heading into that month and you know, Richard, I know, was wondering like, are they actually just going to extend this? You know. Yeah, and they didn't ever say that. And you know, the year, almost not a year but you know, nine months, whatever it's been, has gone by. No one's really talked about it and they've clearly have gotten, I don't know if they use certain metrics or however they decided to do this, but they just quietly made the little change, made

Richard Campbell [00:12:16]:
a little change and never said anything because I guess they don't want to necessarily encourage it either.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:20]:
But yeah, I mean, obviously they do want people on Windows 11, but it's

Richard Campbell [00:12:24]:
also about paying for tech support, right? Like that Microsoft has to maintain people skilled in tech support for 10 for longer.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:31]:
Yeah, I mean, yes and no. I mean, you know, if you're an individual, I don't know how many people are going directly to Microsoft for support. That typically is the responsibility of the PC maker. And by this point they're off the hook anyway. You know, I suppose you could, they must offer paid incident, whatever. But I assume most of this is. Most people just don't bother. I do find it interesting that you could right now enroll and it would still be free and it would just work through the new time period.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:02]:
You don't have to have done it already. If for some reason you have a Windows 10 PC you haven't opened up in a while, you can throw that thing together and it could be supported through next October.

Richard Campbell [00:13:12]:
The numbers must work for them that enough have moved and the ones that haven't moved, it's enough difficulty that you're just like keep supporting them.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:21]:
Then I would like to insert a conspiracy theory into the middle of all these facts because what the heck, I wonder, of course, what this has to do with Windows 12, if that ever occurs, that. Does this say anything about the timing for some next major release of Windows, which way or may not be called Windows 12? Like, is this that thing that 26H1 becomes? Is it going to happen next year, late this year? You know, is it done to line this up so that by the time Windows 10 is truly not supported, at least for consumers, there are still two major versions of Windows that are out there.

Richard Campbell [00:13:59]:
Maybe now you can make an argument for that. They might have betabits flowing around by 27.

Leo Laporte [00:14:10]:
That sounds like a new serial, maybe beta bits, betabits.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:14]:
Yeah, it's the type you get in a bag that's Unmarked, but it looks like alphabets. And the shapes, they're not really letters. They're like mathematical symbols or like. Like, is that an umlaut? What is that?

Richard Campbell [00:14:27]:
It's. It's the. It's the cereal. You can make cartoon swears with

Paul Thurrott [00:14:33]:
you just playing with your cereal, and then you start laughing to yourself like a crazy person. Anyway, whatever. So this is good news. I mean, there's, you know, there's no way around that. It's good. It's good stuff. Yeah, it's good. It's good.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:45]:
It's good. And then in the Insider program, only one major development, I guess they announced as they've been doing. I kind of don't like this. I guess there are different ways to do this, but they announce a bunch of new builds all at once now in the same post, and then they don't really say much about what's in them in that post. So you have to go to all these sub posts to kind of figure out what it is. I know there's a lot of overlap, and I guess I sort of understand it, but it just makes the whole thing rather tedious. But the two main things that came out of this set of updates that date back to last. Where am I? Is it Friday? Yeah, Friday is one.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:23]:
They're making this change, which I actually kind of wondered about because I'd been updating the book. I did an episode of Hands on Windows about this. If you have the new Taskbar experience and you go into Taskbar settings, they didn't change the name of the feature that has been in Windows 11 for a while, but never worked correctly. So if you scroll down to the bottom of Tasks, is it the bottom? Actually, it's not the bottom, but wherever it is in Taskbar behaviors, it is the bottom. There is an option called show smaller Taskbar Buttons, which is accurate until now because if you turn this on or if you just made it always on, the Taskbar buttons would get smaller, but the taskbar stayed the bigger size. And it's like, guys,

Richard Campbell [00:16:11]:
what's the point?

Paul Thurrott [00:16:12]:
I know, but in this new version of the Taskbar, they didn't change the option name, but if you actually turn that to Always now, or in the new version, if you have it, it actually does make the Taskbar smaller. I just thought that was kind of weird because it's not just the taskbar. So one of the changes that's in the set of Insider bills is they've changed the language of that. So in other words, instead of it being the Old option, it actually has a new name where it's more accurately says let me see if I can find this thing because I don't have this build yet or I don't have this feature enabled yet. But I think it just says. It doesn't matter what it says, it's just more accurate. Basically it says it's just taskbar size, it's like small, large or automatic or whatever. So good.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:56]:
That's good. But the other change is Microsoft this past, it was probably may announced and then started implementing a new Windows Insider channel system. Right. So instead of having Dev Beta Canary and Release Preview, they now have experimental and then 118 other sub channels in as part of a, you know, a simpler inside a program. But the weirdness of this, and this is something that's really bit me a lot because again, you know, I'm doing these recordings for Hands on Windows, I'm writing the book or whatever. I want to see these new features. So you bring up either a new computer or reset a computer. You have to.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:35]:
Until yesterday, basically you had to go into settings, say yes, I want to be part of the Insider program, I want to be part of the dev channel. You have to boot the computer, you have to install the latest dev build, then you opt into the new system and then you can go into experiment, whatever it is. It's like this multi step program. But they're actually changing that now so that now this is the default Windows Insider interface inside settings. So you will in fact see experimental and beta and not the old stuff. So that's good. So I mean, that's good. I'm glad.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:08]:
That actually came together pretty quick. So that's kind of nice.

Leo Laporte [00:18:12]:
Oh, there we go.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:13]:
And then as far as the rest of those builds, God help you all, I have no idea. I don't think there's much. I literally looked through every one of them. I was like, nope, nope. Oh no, no, not there either. Okay. Yeah, it's not a lot going on.

Leo Laporte [00:18:27]:
I don't know why I'm kind of surprised. Maybe we're not at the end of the Windows segment or anything, but I'm kind of surprised. You didn't mention the extension of Microsoft Support for Windows 10 for another year.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:41]:
I mentioned that at the top of the show.

Leo Laporte [00:18:43]:
Oh, there it is. Quietly extends the. You're so quiet. I didn't hear it.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:48]:
I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte [00:18:48]:
Yeah, we've trumpeted it, but Microsoft didn't want it.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:52]:
They don't. Yeah, they don't.

Richard Campbell [00:18:53]:
They didn't say anything.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:54]:
They don't seem to be super interested in talking about it. Which, you know, I guess does it.

Leo Laporte [00:19:01]:
They don't want people to do it, you think, or this. That they.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:04]:
I don't think they want to call attention to it. It's proud.

Leo Laporte [00:19:06]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:07]:
I like when they kind of just quietly do the right thing, you know, there was a long period of time, and I mean like eight years something or maybe longer, where you could bring in your old Windows 7, Vista, whatever product key and it would activate 8 and then 10 and it worked like forever. And I think it might have even worked on 11.

Richard Campbell [00:19:23]:
They often announced deadlines on that and I don't know if they ever turned it off. I wonder if we could find eight key if we could still upgrade it.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:29]:
No, they actually, they did eventually turn it off, but it took them many years and the original promise was one year, you know, and it was nice.

Richard Campbell [00:19:37]:
There was no reason to turn it off. Like it did nothing bad for them other than retire old versions of Windows, which is really not a bad thing.

Leo Laporte [00:19:44]:
That's a good thing. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:19:46]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:46]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:19:47]:
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think we can pause briefly in this fabulous program without losing any momentum.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:58]:
Wow. Okay, I'll. I take that challenge.

Leo Laporte [00:20:05]:
Now let's talk hardware.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:08]:
Yeah. We should start a bad week for Apple fans. I know we should. It's bad week for everybody. Really. Everybody. Yeah, yeah. I, you know, we have an AI segment.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:18]:
Maybe we need like a component crisis segment. Like, like if you guys, we were all alive during the hostage crisis with Iran, America, like day 627, you know. Yeah, exactly.

Richard Campbell [00:20:31]:
They are handed in though.

Leo Laporte [00:20:32]:
It is the AI, you know, crisis.

Richard Campbell [00:20:36]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:36]:
In some ways kind of go hand in hand.

Richard Campbell [00:20:37]:
I have had listeners asking me about, are you going to do a show about the hardware crisis? I'm like, what am I going to say?

Paul Thurrott [00:20:42]:
I know all we're going to do is just complain every week about how much more expensive everything is, you know,

Leo Laporte [00:20:49]:
and it's not going to go down ever, do you think?

Paul Thurrott [00:20:51]:
I mean, this is, this is the debate, right? Yeah, I don't know. That's the worry. I, I do feel like if they go down, they'll plateau higher than they were before, if that makes sense, you know, but I, but again, we don't know when it's going to end. We don't know. We don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:21:08]:
You know, you do have the problem that what are we at three companies that make 90 plus percent of all the memory.

Leo Laporte [00:21:14]:
Yeah. Micron, SK, Hynix and Samsung.

Richard Campbell [00:21:16]:
Yeah, right. So that. Right that's pretty collusive at some point.

Leo Laporte [00:21:20]:
Well, there is a lawsuit, actually in California against them for. For price fixing. But they're not building new fabs. Oh, I guess Micron, supposedly, they can't.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:31]:
Well, yeah, so Micron, I guess some of those companies could. But. But here's the thing. Why? You know, there's really no incentive for them to do that. When you think about it, they could. They're charging incredibly high prices. These things cost billions and billions of dollars to make. They take years and years to make.

Richard Campbell [00:21:52]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:52]:
And by the time you get this thing in New York State.

Leo Laporte [00:21:54]:
Fab for Micron.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:55]:
Yeah. So if you get. Once you get this thing done, there's a pretty good chance you can't charge the prices you were charging when you started building the thing, which is a big problem. You might have this. All this capacity that never goes used. There you go. That's a huge problem. And there's only so much demand for.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:12]:
Well, we haven't reached the end of it, but they're selling everything they make, I think, right at the price they have. So if it somehow made sense, you could instantly spin a thing up and keep charging that price. They would do it. It's not going to solve our problem because they're not going to sell that stuff to PC makers or device makers. They're going to sell it to AI companies.

Richard Campbell [00:22:29]:
Well, and even it's four years away. Right. Like, whatever's going to happen is going to have happened.

Leo Laporte [00:22:34]:
That's what all the companies are saying. It's like 20, 30 before there's even a chance of this fixing.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:39]:
Yeah, this is a big. This is not a. You know, why doesn't Apple just make iPhones in the United States? It's like you use the word just in there. And I got to say that really, the conversation. Yeah, this just betrays a lack of understanding of how these things work. So there's no, you know, there's no solving it. And, you know, past couple, maybe two weeks ago, whenever it was, we were talking, you know, about this, as we will for a lot this year. We'll talk about it for Xbox later.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:09]:
But, you know, companies that are better positioned to kind of withstand this, so to speak, are now starting to fall as well, and Apple being the biggest one. So I did wake up one morning, I actually noticed this as it was happening. I don't know why I did this, but I went to the Apple Store and said, we're down right now. We'll be back in a little while. And I was like oh that's not, that's not good. They don't have anything coming out now. This is not a new product. And I would say except for iPhones, they basically raised the price on all of their, you know, their major hardware products.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:43]:
So you know some of these are gigantic increases depending on what you know, in Apple. I don't remember the exact prices and like things like Apple TV but like Apple TV 4K whatever the latest one is went from you know, 200 to 350 or something like it's like some of these like jumps are pretty big. I think I know for the about

Leo Laporte [00:23:59]:
that is I doubt they're making new Apple TVs. I doubt that this is passing along the costs of making new Apple TVs.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:06]:
Yeah, right.

Leo Laporte [00:24:08]:
Product.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:10]:
I got that by the way. It was 150 to 250. Not whatever I said but, but yeah, these things all went up pretty.

Richard Campbell [00:24:16]:
That's a hard cost go up.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:18]:
That's a 7,000 increase. I had bought an iPad Pro back in I guess may and that, that and every other iPad Pro is $200 more per configuration, you know, than it was at the time. And boy did I save a lot of money.

Richard Campbell [00:24:34]:
They didn't raise the price on the iPad, on the iPhone because they figured they're concerned about the icry so they offset the cost by raising the price on the other products more.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:42]:
Yeah, and they will raise the price on the new ones when those come out.

Leo Laporte [00:24:45]:
Cost that much more. Of course, iPhone, apple watch and AirPods. But now remember, the AirPods don't have RAM or hard drives. The ipod, the iPad has RAM and SSDs as does the iPhone. But yeah, I figured they're gonna do, let's see. No, it was the watch. The watch has RAM but no storage. Anyway, the watch, phone and AirPods did not go up.

Leo Laporte [00:25:12]:
That's the only product.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:13]:
Okay, but I bet they all go up in September, right? I think this is reasonable to expect. So, so here we are, this is the world. I mean we have these smaller companies in the PC space like Microsoft, not a big PC maker. We have big players. Hp, Lenovo, et cetera, Apple. We've reached the point of there's no one immune at this point and that's bad for everybody. We've already talked about how bad the surface price increases were this year. They just announced those new products and you're just going to see this everywhere.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:48]:
I talk about this Asus laptop. You know, this is a couple hundred bucks more expensive than it was when you know, between the time they shipped it to me and the time I wrote about it, the price of that went up. I mean, that's just. This is the world is crazy. So there's that. So Apple, I think Apple is the canary in this particular coal mine. Or maybe one of the opposite of a canary is because they were last. But yeah, yeah, I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:10]:
Yeah, the guy who called in sick because he wanted to watch tv. I don't know. Whatever they are, you know, there you go. So there's no escaping. This is the bad news. And then the Microsoft says the best

Richard Campbell [00:26:22]:
deals for manufacturing now also have to raise prices.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:26]:
Right, Right. Yeah. What a world. You know, like big tech is not just terrible to everyone else, they're terrible to themselves. You know, Apple doesn't have the ability to go to whatever supplier and say, you know, you got to give us some of this. Say, no, we don't. We have someone paying a lot more than you over here. Sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:45]:
It's incredible. So that's the world. You know, these things are businesses. I mean, you know, why doesn't Apple just suck it up and you know, save us from that cost increase as customers? Because Apple is a company, not a charity. And despite their marketing, they're really in this to make money. So sorry, you know, that's just the, that's the world.

Richard Campbell [00:27:05]:
If you don't like it, you could buy somebody else's product

Leo Laporte [00:27:10]:
who isn't raising prices.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:11]:
That's the question. Yeah, exactly. Nobody. You're stuck. So that's that. I don't remember the timing anymore, but sometime in the past month or so, Microsoft announced the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 based Surface Laptop and Surface Pros. Right. And there are multiple models of each.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:30]:
One of the things they had said at the announcement was that they were going to start they would sell in the Future configurations with 8 gigs RAM. Until they did that, all these things started at 16. These are Copilot plus PCs in the same way that Microsoft is 16 the

Richard Campbell [00:27:47]:
base for Copilot plus PC.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:48]:
Yeah, it is, yeah. So Microsoft quietly extended Windows 10 ESU by a year. And they also quietly released those 8 gig configurations without telling anybody. So if you go to configure one of these, you will in fact be able to buy an 8 gig version of the. It's probably the smaller of each, like the 12 inch Surface Pro because there was a 13 inch and then the 13 inch Surface laptop, whereas there's also a 13.5 and a 15 inch model there. They start at $850 and $950 respectively. They announced those things before or they didn't announce them. I'm sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:26]:
They added those things to their website to buy before Apple announced that they were raising prices. At that time it was like. Well, the MacBook Neo also 8 gigs of RAM started at $600. It was like. But now those are a little more expensive. I think the base price is probably. I assume it's $699 or whatever. It's a little closer.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:51]:
The Microsoft ones are still more expensive. They have to be. But the hope here is that the work that Microsoft and Apple respectively are doing to their platforms this year to make these systems more efficient and more resource friendly will make that experience better. I wouldn't touch an 8 gig PC with your hands. I don't.

Richard Campbell [00:29:09]:
It seems like an unwise solution to the problem. It's better to buy an extended warranty on your existing machine and stretch it out another year or two.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:18]:
We talked about this last week, I think. But this is compounded by the fact that all of these computers, basically the RAM is either soldered or integrated into the SoC. And there is no way to upgrade this later. And that's a huge problem because. Because you can make a compelling case for saving money today and getting less storage and RAM than you might want with the understanding that in the future there'll be a sale someday or whatever it is. Prices actually come down. Whatever. You'll be able to upgrade that.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:46]:
And it's okay. It's not ideal, but it's not a thing for the vast majority of PCs. I think I've only for all the P. I don't know how many I've reviewed so far this year, but usually it's like 20 to 25 in a year. I've only seen one computer with upgradable RAM myself, which you know is anecdotal, but there just aren't that many of them.

Leo Laporte [00:30:04]:
No.

Richard Campbell [00:30:05]:
The drive for the Ultrabook for maximum thinness and so forth drove us to soldered on components.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:11]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:30:11]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:12]:
Now the industry was so we were so busy copying Apple, we sort of never thought about like, how we might better differentiate. Yeah. What the outcome might be, etc.

Richard Campbell [00:30:21]:
But the market also accepted it too and said, oh, I can't change it around. Whatever. I never changed the Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:27]:
It's so troubling. And this too is a thing. There will be exceptions to this, of course. There are some laptop models. It's possible the laptop I'm using right now might be the one I can't remember which one. This is a ThinkPad P1, which I think has that new. I think they're called Codims or there's a new name for it, but they're kind of a smaller, thinner, lighter, dim kind of card. So there are some.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:53]:
But this is very uncommon in the portable space for sure. Surface Pro8 gig surface laptop. Not super interesting to me, but you can at least configure those devices with more RAM and more storage at purchase time. You'll pay a lot for it. I mean, the $850 12 inch Surface Pro goes from 849 to 1049. So it's a $200 price increase just to get 16 gigs of RAM, which honestly for Surface, I have to say is pretty good. Like, it's actually not too bad, but it's still, it's still real money. I mean, it's kind of tough, you know, same thing on the surface laptop.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:32]:
It's 949 to 1149. So you know, you have these options. You could spend over three grand on a Surface and you could spend I think over 10 grand on the MacBook Pro right now if you wanted to. But God, you know, the thing is

Leo Laporte [00:31:48]:
I, I'm not going to spend that kind of money, but I would love a Mac studio that had enough RAM that I could run local models because it's very good for local models. They don't even sell them.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:57]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:31:57]:
So that will top memory is now 96 gigs. They can't get.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:00]:
I don't, I'm not the Apple rumor guy, but I, I do read up on this stuff and I, I don't remember date. I don't remember anything, like, anything exact. But I know that is coming. And it might, that might be a 2028 thing, but eventually, you know, maybe it's like an M7 by that point, whatever the schedule is. But the plan is to have that kind of thing in the future, but it's not going to happen this year. I mean, you're not going to see that anytime soon.

Leo Laporte [00:32:22]:
Which must be griping Apple a little because they have this hardware that's really well suited to it. They just can't get the ram.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:30]:
You have to wonder if there's anything that can be done with Apple silicon to make this work better with less ram, which is the big thing. This is the Gemini Nano model. I don't know. I don't know. Okay, so there's that. And then of course, you know, when you hear this, you're like, well, Microsoft has sold These Surface Go, Surface Laptop, go. These low end computers now as these were coming out just a few years back, several years back, whatever it might be, they were using the equivalent, whatever the names are, you know, in modern days of what we used to call Pentium or Celeron, intel has a Wildcat chip set coming out that is the modern version, that stuff. So it should be pretty good.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:12]:
I mean ARM announced, or Qualcomm rather announced the Snapdragon C, etc. But apparently Microsoft has discontinued those laptops, so they hadn't been refreshed in a long time. But Zach Boden over at Windows Central says that they've ended production. There are no versions in the pipeline.

Richard Campbell [00:33:29]:
They weren't Copilot PC compliant.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:32]:
Yeah, and also Surface specifically, they're consolidating brands, Right. They want to have fewer computers and this is a lot like the Insider program. So it's primarily Surface Laptop and Surface Pro, but there are three different versions of Laptop and two different versions of Pro and there are multiple versions of both because they come with intel and Qualcomm versions. So it's actually, it's still kind of complicated. So I think Microsoft's official answer, if they have addressed this would be to say we don't need those anymore because what we have now is the 8 gig configurations of Service Laptop and Pro. An 8 gig configuration of either of those products with a Qualcomm Snapdragon C I would be vaguely curious about. But maybe they're not ready. That's not what they're offering.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:18]:
So the 850, 950 price is a Snapdragon X2 Plus. Actually it might be an X1. Let me just, let me look. Yeah, Excuse me, I'm sorry. It's actually last year's Plus. It's not even the X2 plus, it's the X Plus from last year, which sounds terrible. It's not. In fact, we'll talk about that in one moment.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:41]:
My experience last year, buying what at the time was a $600 Snapdragon X, like the very basest version of that chip on a 15 inch HP laptop was wonderful. That computer is still fantastic today. This year you kind of step up to an X2 plus. And I just reviewed, I think it's an IdeaPad Slim 5X which is at 850 bucks. Fantastic. So those low end chips are actually very good. I would be more willing to accept a low end Snapdragon than an intel chip any day. I mean, there's no doubt about that.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:14]:
I don't know If a Snapdragon C will be cheaper or maybe they went with the last year chip because that actually is cheaper. I don't know. I mean, it's Microsoft, who can say? But maybe they got a good deal on them. They went to a yard sale, there were a bunch of them in a basket. I don't know what they do, but that's what they're doing. So that's, that's a thing. But, you know, we'll see if this evolves.

Leo Laporte [00:35:35]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:36]:
And then I'm just mentioning this because, well, I just reviewed it. I don't usually, I don't usually call out individual reviews, but I have now had one experience with that Highest end Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip. And this is the one where they integrate the ram into the SoC. It's not, it's not just, you know, soldered on. It's like, you know, dramatically faster access to ram, which I believe is probably a bigger deal than the chip itself, honestly, and for the reason I just sort of stated, which is that my experience over these past three years now with various levels of x OGX, you know, x x plus x extreme and the next two plus extreme and now extreme, I'm sorry, x 2 plus x 2 elite and now x 2 elite extreme, is that unless you're doing something insane, which I have never been able to figure out what that could be on an ARM computer. They just all kind of work really well, you know, if somehow this thing magically played triple A games and it just worked, I guess you could make that case. There's no version of a test that makes sense to me where I could demonstrate that running some local AI task, whatever it might be, doubling the resolution of an image in photos, or pick your little whatever it is where I can say, yep, this thing is like 25, 50% whatever number faster. I don't see that.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:03]:
I don't know what to say about this. So this thing is wonderful. It's a little expensive, it's probably more future proof. And a lot of it has to do with, I think with the speed of the ram, honestly, and the amounts. Because these things come, well, started with 48 gigs of RAM, which is a curious amount, I think we can all agree. But now they have a 24 gigabyte configuration as well to kind of address the price increases. So someday there will be a thing. Look, people can run benchmarks.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:32]:
I get all that stuff. You can. I, I don't care about that stuff. I just use the thing and I got to tell you, build quality notwithstanding, you go from a X2 to an X2 Elite Extreme and you're doing the same thing, whatever it is, Visual studio, compiling, running an app. I don't use Photoshop, but affinity, doing whatever with graphics, editing, video, whatever it is, it works great on both. And I don't know what to tell you. It's just not that different. I think the RAM matters more, which is again a problem right now because RAM is stupid expensive.

Richard Campbell [00:38:03]:
I'm looking at specking a machine out. It doesn't even tell me how much RAM I get in it.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:07]:
And the. Oh, the Asus.

Richard Campbell [00:38:10]:
Oh yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:10]:
Oh yeah, it's. It's 24 or 48.

Richard Campbell [00:38:12]:
It's that 24, 48 and yeah. And if you get the X2, I think it comes with 48, like you don't really have a choice.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:17]:
Okay, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:38:18]:
So maybe we should now have a serious conversation about how much RAM you really need.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:23]:
Well, this what bothers me is more.

Leo Laporte [00:38:27]:
Yeah, well, we've always said that, but now you can't get more.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:31]:
No, no, I still believe that for anyone listening to this show. And it's 16 or 32 or more. I mean, no doubt about it. The thing is, when Apple announces something like a MacBook Neo and everyone's like, oh my God, I can't believe it's only 500 bucks or whatever the price was, this is like. I don't mean to demean it in this way, but this is what Chromebooks are for. A Chromebook is not typically used all day long. Every day, although some people do. As a computer, it's a secondary device.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:00]:
It's like you're mostly on your phone, but sometimes you need the big screen and the keyboard and all that kind of stuff. And that to me is what the MacBook Neo is. That to me is what any 8 gigabyte machine is today. That's not all day long every day. You sending a kid off to school for 4 years start with an 8 gig laptop is a punishment. That is not right.

Leo Laporte [00:39:18]:
But that's the Neo a lot of people I know.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:20]:
And that's why I don't recommend that.

Leo Laporte [00:39:22]:
Because for high school maybe you think,

Paul Thurrott [00:39:24]:
no, not for any amount of time. Because it's just a future proof issue. If there was some way to configure it with 16, you know, if that was just an option, which it will be right next year or whatever, 12. But okay, that's fine. That's a step up, you know, whatever it might be. I mean, there's always like these. Not always. There's often these weird amounts like when I bought my Surface level laptop.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:43]:
And again this year, you know, it's like 16. It's not 16. 32, 64. It's like 16 24. You're like what, you know, 32, 48, 64. Right? So I go, okay, yeah. So you get these half steps, right? And that's fine. Anything is better than eight, you know, nine would be better than eight, but whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:02]:
Anything is better than that. And if your goal is to actually use this thing all day, use the computer. Not just have the computer and use it sometime, but use. It's 8 gig is not enough. This is what I liked about Copilot Plus PC. It established an acceptable baseline. 16 gigs RAM, 256 gigs of storage, which that actually is kind of low. And then Apple did the same thing later that year when they came up the new generation of Macs.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:28]:
Later that year, 16 became the baseline. And that's the right number, you know. Except now. Excuse me, I'm sorry, my throat is

Leo Laporte [00:40:37]:
right here.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:38]:
You need some more?

Leo Laporte [00:40:39]:
You need some ram. He's low on ram.

Richard Campbell [00:40:42]:
There's a throat.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:44]:
Yep, two. Needed two nanometer water. Yeah, so. But I mean, it depends on what you. Obviously there are. Look, some people do need more. This is the fact, right? Some people do they know who they are. Maybe they're gamers, maybe they're engineers, scientists, programmers, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:03]:
Most people though over buy and they do it because of a just in case kind of a situation, right? It's like. You never know.

Leo Laporte [00:41:10]:
You said the words future.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:12]:
Yeah, but there. But to me that's the happy medium. I mean, because we, you know, expect. Leaving out the fact that you cannot upgrade. Sorry, I don't know what's going on here. It's, you know, that's something you do have to think about. So. I don't know, four years in high school, eight to 12.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:33]:
Would that make the difference? Yeah, maybe. Sorry, I gotta. I gotta figure this out.

Leo Laporte [00:41:42]:
Take a break and we'll come back with more in just a minute.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:46]:
Sorry, Paul.

Leo Laporte [00:41:47]:
Coughing.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:47]:
I know. I don't know what's going on there.

Leo Laporte [00:41:49]:
Sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:50]:
It's relentless.

Leo Laporte [00:41:50]:
I'm gonna do an ad. That's what I'm gonna do. That's why the ads are here, to actually separate the. You know, give you guys a break. In other words, they used to say that the newspaper news stories were just there to separate the ads. And I think that's still true to some extent. Our show today. Not true.

Leo Laporte [00:42:11]:
No, you matter, Paul. You matter to me. We've got Paul's minimal viable voice back.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:19]:
I know. I think the. So, by the way, we're having a crazy heat wave thing here on the East coast. It's gonna be 100 degrees tomorrow. It's 96 right now.

Leo Laporte [00:42:28]:
Yikes.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:28]:
But so you know, the AC is cranking, but I also. I usually keep a couple windows cracked, like in the bedroom, for example. I actually close those. I wonder if it's not just like ac, like it just dries you out.

Leo Laporte [00:42:38]:
Might well be. Yeah, sure, could be.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:41]:
I don't know. Anyway, anything. Anything that keeps.

Richard Campbell [00:42:43]:
Tell me.

Leo Laporte [00:42:43]:
I will. I will make up an ad if you need it. You just tell me when you need a break.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:48]:
I think anything that makes me speak less is fine. So it's all good anyway. Yeah. So, look, just to kind of wrap up the whole component crisis thing, we're screwed. Okay, so we do have some AI stuff this week. We might as well benefit from the reason for our component crisis.

Richard Campbell [00:43:11]:
Remember that memory you can't buy? It's trying to understand the sentence you just wrote.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:17]:
The first story is kind of bizarre in a way. So HP, right, the world's second biggest maker of PCs, is partnering with OpenAI.

Leo Laporte [00:43:27]:
And

Paul Thurrott [00:43:30]:
the reason you're having problems selling PCs is going to somehow be the thing that helps you sell more PCs. So here's the thing. So this is a tough one. I love hp. They make great products. I'm not really dumping on them or anything like that, but hp, like Lenovo, does the same thing. Depending on the type of PC you buy, there's going to be like this stuff bundled on there. Some of it's going to be from third party, some of it's going to be from hp, some of it's going to be useful and some of it is not.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:02]:
And if it's a consumer PC, there's going to be more of that is not stuff. Right. Crapware, as we call it. One of the things both these companies are doing, which this kind of thing has always bothered me and it bothers me more, I think with AI is they have AI chatbots of their own that use whatever on the back end. It doesn't matter, who cares. Nobody wants another chatbot. And I will never understand this. I just don't quite get this.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:28]:
But their partnership with OpenAI isn't just about making that chatbot better. In fact, we're not entirely sure exactly what it is what they're doing, because they can't really be specific yet. This is something that's going to evolve over time, but they are looking to provide a AI based experience. Of course, this is their words, store partner, chat and voice experiences. So this is something where customers and partners can get answers more quickly, complete whatever workflows, you know, et cetera, et cetera, and then internally to kind of help with, you know, customer service and whatever else. And you know, they've been evaluating the OpenAI frontier model since I think February, if I remember correctly. Super complimentary about it, which is a little whatever, but we'll see. They did also hint, yes, PC sales

Richard Campbell [00:45:22]:
are down, they're probably going to do some layoffs, but if you call them AI layoffs, then your stock price goes up.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:28]:
Yeah, I didn't read this, but I think it was Ford that had laid off a bunch of people months ago, blamed AI and they fell back like, yep, just kidding. We need those guys back. I think we're going to see some

Richard Campbell [00:45:39]:
of that wrong doing in the wrong order. Like you get the automation working, show that people are actually redundant because they're not doing anything more. And then you lay them off. This, lay them off and then we'll figure out the AI thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:51]:
Yeah, this is not, that's, that's bad leadership. That's just that decision making, that's stupid.

Richard Campbell [00:45:57]:
I mean, the upside is you get a quarter showing, look, AI worked, our income are up because we laid a bunch of people off and it reduced our costs. Then the next quarter when nothing works and your customers are all pissed, you have to get them back.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:11]:
Obviously HP is not talking about layoffs right now, but we'll see where that goes. But the difference between HP and the other two big companies in the top three of the PC market, Dell and Lenovo, is that Dell and Lenovo both still have their server and now what would call cloud data center business, hp, remember, split off. So there's HP as we're calling it, which is computers and printers, and then there's HPE HP Enterprise, which does that.

Richard Campbell [00:46:39]:
Other half it's not, it's like 75%.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:44]:
Okay. But they're, you know, they're other thing. So today what we're seeing on, you know, in the, in the industry, except for with hp, is that Dell and Lenovo are growing very quickly, month or quarter over quarter because they have this growing data center business or two businesses.

Richard Campbell [00:47:01]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:02]:
And HP does not have that. HP like Lenovo also sell and no, not like Dell actually mostly like Lenovo also sells other devices. And there's the obvious devices, keyboards, mice, et cetera, cameras, but also just different Things they sell all kinds of peripherals and sort of smart devices. HP or Lenovo rather has a big business, Android tablets and smart devices of all kinds and they do all that kind of stuff. So HP kind of hints that they're working on what they call a suite of agenic AI devices that seamlessly integrate into existing workflows, increasing employee efficiency. And so these things apparently going to require what they call again in their words, always on inference and hardware optimized for running agenic AI workloads. 24, 7 HP, I feel like has kind of gotten away from this a little. Lenovo is much bigger in this space right now, but for many years was doing lots of experimental PCs, but also other devices that you kind of use around PCs where maybe you have this scanner that you know, you would use in a professional environment to, you know, for scanning obviously or whatever, line printing and whatever different things.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:10]:
But it seems like maybe given the downturn in PCs that might persist for some years, they're trying to expand where they can. Right. Which is not into servers or the data center like Dell and Lenovo can do, but rather in this new direction. So maybe there's something here that I'm not privy to because honestly it's pretty vague, but it is kind of curious. It's like we've embraced the company that's putting us out of business. Okay, good luck with that.

Richard Campbell [00:48:40]:
Well, I mean you want to do a project to optimize your firm that's not doing well for various reasons. Hopefully you do it in appropriate way where when it has success then you make changes to optimize. But you might as well go with the so called expert.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:57]:
Yes. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:48:59]:
I mean, I mean, how many years has OpenAI got experience helping enterprises automate with their tools? 2.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:05]:
Right. And is it really experience or is it. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Look, maybe the. This is going to be the greatest thing in the world. I find it curious.

Richard Campbell [00:49:14]:
I mean they're a pretty. The origins of that company are a responsible group of engineers and hopefully responsible engineers pilot this project and give us real results.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:23]:
Yeah, I mean the people I know there and the people I meet there who kind of are behind the scenes and work on the hardware. Fantastic. I mean they really do make great computers, but they're also constrained by the world as it is like everyone else. So we'll see what that looks like. But it's kind of interesting. I had to look this one up because I have to say I wasn't sure Anthropic Announced a new version of what they call the cloud sonnet model, version 5. And at first I was like, wait a minute. I'm like, is this something I could run locally? Is this like an slm? And it's not.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:55]:
It's a cloud model. All the big players have their biggest, what they now call frontier models, but they also have these more efficient models that are faster, less expensive, etc. And then of course, they have the SLMs. In some cases, they'll have open source versions like Google makes Gamma and so forth. It is a cloud model, basically. What this thing is something we're starting to see a lot where these companies realize that their own cost overruns, which involve just requiring massive amounts of infrastructure to get anything done, are a huge problem and are a big blocker to profitability. And they're trying to make now more efficient models across the board. So they still offer those, the big heavy models, like in their case, Opus 4.8 is the latest version.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:40]:
But then they have this thing which, when you look at the scores where they compare them and compare to the predecessor, this thing is very, very close in almost all categories to the big, heavy, expensive model, but it's dramatically less expensive and faster. Yeah. And I think this is going to be part of that. I always call it orchestration, because I'm not sure how else to describe this. But you're going to have this collection model. Some of them are going to be very focused on whatever particular task or workflow, whatever it is. Some of them are going to be more general and humongous, but figuring out which one to use and which time is important. They're starting to do smart defaults for people so they don't overspend, because they're starting to charge individuals for this stuff now too, which is important.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:24]:
Important. And you could override that if you're like, look, I want the expensive one. I know what I'm doing. You have to go do that manually, but you can do it. So this is just interesting as I

Richard Campbell [00:51:36]:
always question whether people really know one way or the other. I often ask them, why was that one better than that one? What's your metric? What are you actually testing for?

Paul Thurrott [00:51:43]:
Yeah, right. And a lot of people would say, I just want the best one. It's the reason I bought a $3,000 computer. I just, you know, I just, I want all the gigs when it's running

Richard Campbell [00:51:53]:
in the cloud anyway. You could have run it on a.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:55]:
That's right.

Richard Campbell [00:51:55]:
Pack of gum with wings.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:56]:
Yeah, right.

Richard Campbell [00:51:57]:
Did we talk about Mythos? Being available again.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:00]:
No, we did not. So, yeah, I didn't follow the exact trajectory of this, but it probably had been mostly unavailable. Call it for the better part of a month, I think it was. Or just two weeks. Or two weeks.

Richard Campbell [00:52:10]:
Yeah, it was shut down. Feels like back on the 27th.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:13]:
Yeah, it felt like an eternity.

Leo Laporte [00:52:14]:
The world changed while it was gone and suddenly China's on top, Right?

Paul Thurrott [00:52:18]:
Yeah, right, exactly. This crazy.

Leo Laporte [00:52:22]:
I'm looking right now to see I still don't have Fable back, but it's supposedly.

Richard Campbell [00:52:26]:
No, I said Fable was supposed to be today.

Leo Laporte [00:52:28]:
Yeah. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:30]:
Yeah. We talked about the reason this is bad. And to me, it's really about the companies especially. But governments too, right. That are using this to look for vulnerabilities in their most critical software and then fix that stuff. And this. Whatever. We can go back and forth and we always will, but pros and cons of AI in this case, and there's a lot of argument to be made, but this is the clearest, best, you know, most defensible use of AI.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:57]:
Maybe that there is. Like, it's.

Richard Campbell [00:52:59]:
It's great. I hope someday we hear what went on for these two weeks. Yeah, like, I thought it would be the weekend.

Leo Laporte [00:53:07]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:53:08]:
They shut it down on the Friday. By Monday, it'd be back. I'm kind of stunned. It would. Was two weeks. Did nobody clue in you were impairing all the white hats, trying to make the system safer?

Paul Thurrott [00:53:20]:
Well, I don't know why. I mean, this is a government thing, and we don't exactly have a functioning government. So it's, you know. No, it's a problem.

Richard Campbell [00:53:27]:
It's a problem. They went immediately to the citizenship test

Leo Laporte [00:53:31]:
because somebody called it huge own goal this week. Because what happened is a lot of people said, oh, crikey. And by the way, not just people in the U.S. but people around the world. If the government can just block an AI exactly randomly for no apparent reason and without explaining, we better not be dependent on America's AI models.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:52]:
We were already in a. We're already in a period where Europe especially. But the world has an understanding that we need to be independent of the United States because we cannot trust this country to do the right thing for us. Of course you can't. And this is. This drove that home very nicely. I mean, this is. You know, this is.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:11]:
This is why it's not just access to the best AI chips, it's national security.

Leo Laporte [00:54:16]:
I mean, I just look at myself. So the first thing I did is I said, well, what else can I Because I was in the middle of a fable.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:22]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:54:22]:
Build.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:23]:
I know this is going to end with the word deep sick, isn't it?

Leo Laporte [00:54:27]:
You're like, well, deep seek's actually really good. Then there's GLM from Z AI, which is about a tenth of the cost and is very good. And then there's Quen. There's a number of Chinese, but these are all Chinese models.

Richard Campbell [00:54:41]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:41]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:54:41]:
There are some I can run locally.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:44]:
And that's like, look, this is like anything else. We all have opinions about China in this case and whatever. But let me tell you, the first time you get into a Chinese electric vehicle like I do in Mexico, and you're like, I'm sorry, did the future happen? And no one told me, it's astonishing, like, how good these things are and how inexpensive they are.

Leo Laporte [00:55:02]:
To extend that analogy, this is if the American President decided, you know, let's ban American cars.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:09]:
Right, Right.

Leo Laporte [00:55:10]:
And all of a sudden everybody discovered how good the Chinese EVs were.

Richard Campbell [00:55:15]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:55:15]:
And then three weeks later he says, yeah, nevermind, let's not ban him. But it's too late now.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:20]:
Everybody knows.

Leo Laporte [00:55:21]:
Everybody now knows.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:23]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:55:23]:
So. And by the way, Anthropic Solace already said, when Fable comes back, Fable and Mythos apparently will be available to the public today, but when they come back with massive restrictions, they even said in some cases, when you're coding with Fable, it will drop back to Opus 4.8. So prepare. You know, the clock has started. In within minutes you're going to hear people going, they nerfed it. It's no good anymore.

Richard Campbell [00:55:47]:
It's crippled.

Leo Laporte [00:55:48]:
Yeah. They can't. Well, it could never live up to what our imaginations thought it was anyway.

Richard Campbell [00:55:53]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:54]:
Well, that's funny. That's my back of the book topic. It's like, we're, we're already, we're. We're nostalgic now for something that happened three weeks ago. You know, remember the good old days when AI was open to everybody? We just go, you know? Yeah. It's crazy.

Leo Laporte [00:56:09]:
I actually been. It's, it was an eye opener. And I've been very happy with running a local model for a lot of my work. I still use Claude for hardcore coding, but I don't have to use it for everything. And I think.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:21]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:56:22]:
It's just risky. It's bad for anthropic. And Anthropic sort of brought this on themselves by, by scaring everybody.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:30]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:56:30]:
You know, you don't want to scare President Trump because he has a lot of power.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:35]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:56:36]:
And you scare him.

Richard Campbell [00:56:37]:
He's gonna, he might react rather reactionary.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:40]:
Yeah, I haven't noticed that. But I, I'm just kidding. It's like stepping on a cat's tail, you know, it's like, yeah, like where did that come from? You know?

Leo Laporte [00:56:50]:
Yeah. So anyway, it's a, it's. Yeah, we'll talk about it a lot coming up on intelligent machines.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:56]:
But it's a. I think between now and the time you do, it will probably change, right? In other words.

Leo Laporte [00:57:01]:
Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:02]:
Those models will probably arrive and then we'll see. And you all are. You may or may already start getting stories from people like, yeah, they screwed this thing up, you know. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see what happens.

Leo Laporte [00:57:10]:
But it's amazing what a world.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:13]:
It is crazy. I. Logically, anyone, anyone who knows even a little bit about this stuff, all of us certainly, and people listening, whatever, you know, can look at the world the way it is and understand that as AI improves, local AI improves, you know, that the gap between the two is probably going to shrink. That at some point we get to that. What I think of as like the good enough scenario, whatever I talk about, ideally you have a system that's orchestrating the movement between those two plateaus or whatever. So that if you need it, you know, it's like the CPU boost thing, they've just added to Windows like for one second you got to get the full power that goes right back down. So you don't want to screw up your battery life. In this case, you know, we're going to do that with AI.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:59]:
But a lot of the early third parties, maybe fourth part, I don't know how you talk about this, but you have browser makers is a typical example. Companies you've never heard of that are making these little AI things. And when you use something like, I'm not calling these companies out, I don't really use this stuff, but brave whatever might put AI in their product or Firefox is doing this stuff. Your initial reaction to this, if you actually use it is like, eh, you know, it's like, okay, it's doing the thing, but it's not very good. It's like a child's drawing compared to our Leonardo da Vinci thing or whatever. But those things, you know. But now two weeks have gone by and they're getting a lot better. So sometime last year, Proton, for example, released Lumo 2.0.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:46]:
This is not a local AI thing, this is actually cloud based AI. But it's, you know, Proton, so it's privacy first, et cetera, et cetera. And that's a good example of a thing where, you know, I tried it out and I was like, yeah, okay. You know, like, it's. Yeah, it's doing the thing, it's doing the chatbot thing. It's okay. You know, there's a free tier for this. Like there are for a lot of AIs, and then there are these pay tiers you get through whatever, Proton subscriptions, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:10]:
But they just released a major new version of this one and it has, you know, it has all the keywords, you know, memory projects. Right. What they're calling custom lumos. This is three years ago, we would have called this a. Oh, my God, I'm going to forget the term. Remember Microsoft. Yeah, custom GPTs. Remember, we called, very briefly, we called them this.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:31]:
Remember, I remember those, these words. Yeah. Microsoft gave it to, well, sold it to individuals through what was Copilot Pro, briefly. And then they took it away. And then they took Copilot Pro away, too. But, you know, it's multimodal. It's, you know, it does all. It does all the stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:50]:
So this, you know, I'd say this is a good example. You have to, you know, you're going to pay for it most likely some amount. I mean, it's less expensive than big AI or whatever. But this is an example of something where it isn't a good place and it does meet many needs. I'm not, I can't say most. I don't really know what all needs are. But. And this is how this stuff is progressing.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:14]:
And so this is tied. This, by the way, European. They're tied into that EU sovereignty directive that they're working on there. They're a big player in this space. So in this little tech space. Right. So that's interesting to me. This is again, in the sense that all AI is always getting better.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:34]:
I feel like the local AI is.

Richard Campbell [01:00:37]:
Yeah. The Microsoft thing became Scout, right. They shut it all down, reorganized it.

Leo Laporte [01:00:42]:
The Microsoft thing, that's their agent. And now Google,

Paul Thurrott [01:00:47]:
this is their personal AI agent. Uses an individual like Leo just said, Spark for Google.

Leo Laporte [01:00:54]:
Yeah, I use Hermes because I decided I didn't want any company. So this is going to become more of an issue too, is privacy. The companies now are snarfing up everything you send to it. Everything in the prompt, all the copy,

Paul Thurrott [01:01:08]:
everything they're sending, stuff you send to someone else. They're just grabbing the bits as they fly by. I mean, they're just repatient people are

Leo Laporte [01:01:15]:
More concerned about this. And so that's why, by the way, Microsoft and Google are creating their versions of OpenCloud. They don't want you to use something local. They want you to do everything on the cloud. Right. That's better for them. So I'm using open source one that. It sits on my hard drive.

Leo Laporte [01:01:32]:
All the memories on the hard drive. And what I really want to do is also use a local model because then nothing goes out of my network.

Richard Campbell [01:01:39]:
Yeah, right.

Leo Laporte [01:01:40]:
Unfortunately, local models are quite. Not up to the.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:43]:
But I think they're gonna get there. I mean, they are. They are gonna get there.

Leo Laporte [01:01:47]:
I'm using one now that I'm very, very happy with. And it's all 90% of what I do.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:53]:
I'm not good at this kind of stuff. But the Sonnet 5 I mentioned earlier is a. It's like a 1 million context window, if that makes sense. I'm not really the language. Okay, whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:02:06]:
Yeah, nothing's a million anymore. Millions.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:08]:
Okay. I look, I look at this and

Leo Laporte [01:02:09]:
I think to myself, you know, context window. You're right.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:11]:
It's 1 million, the context. So, yeah, I'm just not good with these terms. But the. This is the type of thing that not three months ago, but six, nine months ago, was just. The just expensive models in the cloud, etc. Six months from now will be local. No doubt about it. If it isn't already, these lines are blurring.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:30]:
There is local, there's cloud, but there's also the big companies, and then the mistrals, the protons, whoever else, Chinese companies, however you want to define these things. But there's such a mix of this stuff, and there probably will be for the foreseeable future. I don't keep hammering on this, but I really feel like orchestrating between them is the key, you know, because that's

Leo Laporte [01:02:55]:
why the agent's important. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:57]:
They just change so much that the whole thing to harness being yet another awesome AI word that was invented two seconds ago, which drives me crazy.

Leo Laporte [01:03:07]:
Like a horse. You got the engine, but you got the bridle. The harness. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:11]:
And you're under the horse's butt and he's taking a dump. No, I get the relationship.

Leo Laporte [01:03:16]:
I just don't.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:17]:
You know, But I mean, it's just. But it's. It like the. Here's the way.

Leo Laporte [01:03:21]:
Think of it. I got a good way to think of it. Think of it as a robot with hands and eyes and feet. And then there's a brain. What you want is your own robot. That's the Harness or the rig or whatever, and the brain. You can put different models in. I don't want to say always use codecs, always use sonnet.

Leo Laporte [01:03:38]:
So I have a local model right now. This is the model I've been using. Somebody listening, Larry? I think in our Discord said, try Ornith. It's amazing. It does everything. But what I've told Ornith is when you need to do code, don't do any coding. You're not smart enough. Use Claude.

Leo Laporte [01:03:54]:
And it does. And. And that's the. That's why the harness, the robot, when

Paul Thurrott [01:03:59]:
you said that to it, did it

Leo Laporte [01:04:00]:
go, oh, you know, it's so funny because you do anthropomorphize and think, I don't want to hurt its feelings.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:05]:
Or he's like, you know what, Leo? You're right, I'm terrible.

Leo Laporte [01:04:07]:
No, it's. It doesn't care. It doesn't. It says, yeah, sure, not a problem. I've never once had it say, you're hurting my feelings.

Richard Campbell [01:04:15]:
It does. And have feelings.

Leo Laporte [01:04:17]:
It's software, so you have to get over that a little bit. But telling it to, you know, if you need to do something with vision, use Gemini. If you need to do something with coding, use Claude.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:30]:
Yeah, but with the caveat that that determination is going to change. Not, maybe not day to day, but, you know, as we go forward, every once in a while, you know, whatever the time frame, all of a sudden this thing is better for that thing, you know, whatever it is.

Leo Laporte [01:04:44]:
So what I've been doing every week on Sunday night, I said, go out, look at all the models, see what people are saying, see what the benchmarks say, and redo your delegation chart. They have a list of things. If it's this, this. This is redo. It. It changes every week depending on what's the best that week.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:03]:
Leo, you are describing. I want to be careful here. A mid-1990s Mac and it has some terrible amount of RAM back. I don't know what they had back then. You got Photoshop on that Mac.

Leo Laporte [01:05:17]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:17]:
And you have to go into the settings for Photoshop and you tell it. This is how much RAM you can use.

Leo Laporte [01:05:22]:
Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:23]:
That is a terrible system.

Leo Laporte [01:05:24]:
Remember those days?

Paul Thurrott [01:05:25]:
I do. I just. Of course I do. And you know, I. I did like I said, ideally, like, like instead of you, like, hey, having to say it and then it.

Leo Laporte [01:05:35]:
No, I don't do it automatically. Okay. Every Sunday night. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:38]:
All right. But, but, but at some point, I had to tell it once.

Leo Laporte [01:05:41]:
Yeah, of course. Do this Every Sunday night.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:44]:
It should just do this automatically and on the fly.

Leo Laporte [01:05:46]:
It does now.

Richard Campbell [01:05:47]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:05:47]:
I don't want it to do too much on of its own volition. I like the idea that I'm saying this would be a good thing to

Paul Thurrott [01:05:55]:
do, but you might not. But I mean, most people do, right?

Leo Laporte [01:05:57]:
I mean. Well, this is the. Yeah, you're right.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:59]:
This is the. Most people do want that, you know,

Leo Laporte [01:06:01]:
and then you give up by doing that. You're gonna let the frontier models do, you know, these big companies control it.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:08]:
Well, that's what I'm trying to get away from. No, of course. But I mean, ideally what you're really doing is saying, look, these are the things you have accessible to you, whatever they are. This is the free thing, the local thing, the local source thing, whatever it is. In extreme situations you might have a paid subscription or whatever it is, who cares? Big tech, little tech, it doesn't matter. And only use that damn thing. Maybe you have to be told or even asked or maybe you have to be part of the loop. Whatever your rules are, you establish that that's what you're doing really when you think about it.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:41]:
But this should work for everybody. Ideally. This is so. It will, it will.

Leo Laporte [01:06:46]:
Down from the, you know, I mean, you know, I'm on. I'm. This is what I do. It's what you do. It's what we all do.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:53]:
We.

Leo Laporte [01:06:53]:
We live on the edge, the cutting edge, which.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:56]:
It never bites me in the butt ever. I don't know about your situation, but

Leo Laporte [01:07:00]:
I've never do it for you guys. That's what we do it for.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:03]:
I think it's mental illness is why we do it. But it's. But a little, you know, but if, if my mental illness can help others, that that's okay. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. This is a weird world.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:21]:
I think Leo just mentioned using Gemini for image creation, which is in fact excellent. I don't always do this, but I often will throw the same prompt through Gemini and then it's Microsoft Designer, but it's Copilot, obviously. And not always, but most times I would say I prefer the Gemini version, but whatever. That doesn't matter. They have whatever version of Nano Banana they're on now. They have personalized intelligence, which is a way that you can opt in and connect Gemini to all of your whatever Google apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, Photos, etc. And what they've done is made. And this is us only unfortunately for right now, but a couple months ago they made.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:04]:
These terms are so weird. It's because they're not used consistently. But it's essentially personalized intelligence in Gemini. And if you use it with image creation, it means you can go to your own Google Photos. And then it was only for Google AI plus Pro or Ultra subscriptions. Now it's free. Obviously, there are limits, but anyone you have to sign in, but you don't pay for it. And if you're in the US and you're over 13 or 18, depending what you're trying to do, it will use personal intelligence to connect Nano Banana to Google Photos and then use that as sort of an inspiration, if you will.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:44]:
And also a. I'm going to call it a grounding in the sense that it knows, like, it could look at your photos and be like, all right, this guy takes a lot of photos of cocktails for some reason. Takes a lot of photos of food on a plate in a restaurant for some reason. Not a lot of pictures of his family, but whatever. Maybe he write like certain colors or whatever it is, but they get an idea, like, where you travel, like what you're doing, etc. So when you say very general things to it, including, like, make a picture of my favorite things, you know, with me in the middle, it will pull that from Google Photos. It's kind of an interesting capability if you're a narcissist or. No, but I mean, maybe you want things to have a certain style or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:27]:
If you have a certain style. I do not, but it's kind of an interesting idea. And at least it's free. I assume within two seconds it will eventually be international as well. But interesting stuff. And this is the gut check moment. You're going to connect Gemini to your Gmail. You're going to connect it to your calendar, you're going to connect it to.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:47]:
It already knows what you're watching on YouTube, I guess, or Google does. But that's a scary little moment. You ever see someone grab the remote of your TV and turn on your YouTube and you're like, oh, crap, here we go. There are gonna be questions.

Richard Campbell [01:10:00]:
I never leave my YouTube logged in.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:02]:
Yeah, right.

Richard Campbell [01:10:04]:
I wanna use YouTube on the phone. I cast it on the TV. You cast it from the phone?

Paul Thurrott [01:10:08]:
Yeah. You're smart, but yeah, mine is just. It's ridiculous, you know, I don't know how my wife puts up with me. Anyway, the point is. But you can open this up to Gemini and have it. Have a little peek at your soul, and you can do that or not do that, I guess. But it is interesting that this is a thing. So anyway, there's.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:29]:
That notion continues to amaze me in some ways because I keep waiting for them just to be like, look, you've been using this damn thing for several years now. We've never charged you a cent. Come on, man. They still have not done that. They do have Notion AI, of course they're getting heavily into the agency stuff, but over the past year to two years, they made a couple of small acquisitions and then launched Google Mail. I'm sorry, Google Mail?

Leo Laporte [01:10:53]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:54]:
Notion Mail and Notion Calendar, these things to me have never kind of fulfilled what I perceive to be the promise of them. Because really what they both are are front ends to Google services. They're just like a kind of a way to. It's honestly a way to get into that ecosystem so that you can then migrate over to their ecosystem is kind of how I see that. So Notion as the all in one does everything app, you can have those views inside of that app, you can have the standalone apps, et cetera, et cetera, but they never push that either beyond Google. So if you wanted to use an Outlook Calendar with Notion Calendar or whatever, or Outlook with Notion Mail, you cannot. It's always just been Google. And then they announced this past week that they are in fact winding down Notion Mail in September.

Leo Laporte [01:11:37]:
Could you explain this? Because I read this and I don't really understand Dan.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:41]:
So I can explain it in the sense that I didn't understand why they announced it because the way they announced it, it was just like, so you're. You've created a front end for another service. I don't like why, you know, and I think the reason is what I said. I think it's really about, you know, there's this Notion as a sort of a little tech company. Google is very much a big tech company. Very popular. Gmail is very popular. Rather than reinvent the horse, it's like, look, all these people are using this thing, many are using it for free.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:09]:
Just get them in here. And then what we're going to charge them for really is not Notion Mail, right. Or Go Notion Calendar because there's no value there per se, but rather for Notion AI. And that AI will do things against the data that's in Gmail and Google Calendar that you might want to use in the projects or notes or whatever it is you're doing in Notion. Right. And that, okay, there's some sense to that, I guess. I. But again, I don't understand how it never expanded beyond just Google like that never made sense to me.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:37]:
If you're going to have a third party email client, it should support email, not Gmail. It's weird, but they're getting rid of it. Their excuse for this I actually do not buy. Let me see if I can find this quote. What they said was we Notion launched this with the belief that, you know, the inbox was blah, blah, blah, whatever. But what, what they say is that now that their own agents have gotten more capable, we're seeing more users. They don't say how many hand off email workflows to the agents. And so over half of Notion Mail users are managing email without ever opening their inbox.

Leo Laporte [01:13:17]:
Oh, that's interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:18]:
I suspect that most people who use Notion Mail never open their inbox either. They just don't use it. So I don't.

Leo Laporte [01:13:26]:
That's the real problem.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:27]:
I don't really understand it, but.

Leo Laporte [01:13:29]:
So what was it? It was an interface to Gmail.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:31]:
Yeah. So if you know how Notion looks like, Notion has this kind of minimalist look to it. So Notion Mail and Calendar have that look and feel, but for email and Calendar respectively, they're standalone apps like on the web, on mobile, I guess on desktop as well. But I think Mail was Mac only, but I'm not really sure. But they're also integrated into Notion itself, the main app. Right. So you get, there are the views and ways to access that stuff. To me, what this, this was all unnecessary.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:59]:
I sort of appreciate they were trying to make a Google workspace alternative that would be cheaper or you know, not Google, whatever that, that's a useful thing to try. But really what they're using Gmail for here in Calendar is a data source. Right. And in the context of whatever you're doing with AI and Notion, if the primary data source maybe is your Notion Notes or whatever projects, whatever you're doing there, you're going to then have a selection of probably thousands of other potential data sources which will be or not be, but could be whatever email you use, whatever Calendar you use, whatever data, who cares? And Slack chats and whatever it is. Who cares?

Richard Campbell [01:14:40]:
They should have gone into more plugins, not they.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:42]:
Yeah, this maybe should have always been just a plug in, right? Yeah, I guess, I guess keeping people in Notion was the idea. Like Notion, they were expanding the notion of what Notion is meaning, you know, sorry, you know, we're going to have these three main apps maybe and that made sense for about two seconds. But I look, the Notion app, the core app that the Core thing that Notion is, is obviously super successful. They're done. Great.

Richard Campbell [01:15:08]:
Sure. And the thing, and the thing we're managing this show from.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:12]:
Yes. And I listen, I've tried so hard to get rid of this thing that is so successful and works so well and it just never works. It just never makes sense. And I will keep trying. Not because I hate Notion, that's what I do. But Notion has withstood every assault, every challenge. It's always been great. These other things though, I just never really saw the point.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:30]:
And I go back and look sometimes and I'm like, I just don't get. Does make sense to use Gmail, like I said, as a data source within Notion. Especially if you're using Notion AI or the agents they're doing now. So that makes sense. Justifying. It's like, well, you know, people were managing their email with agents, like really like, okay, I mean I, I don't know what your email is like. I would love to have an agent. Man, I'm looking at my now, it's terrible.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:55]:
I'm going to look away from that. It's like. I wish, I wish maybe there is a way. I don't know, who can say, but I doubt that people were, you know, just interacting with Notion agents instead of their email.

Richard Campbell [01:16:10]:
I wonder if the mail stuff was just costing them money and not making

Paul Thurrott [01:16:13]:
them anything and I don't think it ever. Yeah, it just didn't make sense.

Leo Laporte [01:16:17]:
So.

Richard Campbell [01:16:17]:
But in the end, referencing AI makes it look like you're competent.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:22]:
Exactly. And by the way, for whatever it's

Leo Laporte [01:16:24]:
worth, I gets the blame for everything.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:26]:
No, the credit and the blame. Right. Depending on the situation, it's like I Notion area might be great. I actually don't know. I'm not, I'm not dumping on it. I. Their need to have a business model and make money is. I have no problem with it.

Richard Campbell [01:16:41]:
You would be sad if the product went to work.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:43]:
Yeah, I mean there are definitely alternatives. But yeah. This still to me is still the one I like.

Leo Laporte [01:16:47]:
I mean, I have some thoughts. You want to hear my thoughts or.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:50]:
Yeah, I do.

Leo Laporte [01:16:51]:
Okay. Because I noticed Claude OpenAI. I'm sorry, Anthropic has announced this Claude Slack thing. Thing. They call it cloud tags. Same idea. And I think it's the same goal with Notion, which is if they can provide and who knows what AI model they're using, they probably don't have their own. They're just interfacing to somebody's frontier model.

Leo Laporte [01:17:12]:
Right. But if they can provide a way to do it inside where you put your data.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:18]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:17:18]:
Whether it's Slack or Notion, then they get access to your data and that's gold for them. And that's that same conversation about privacy that we had earlier. I'm not sure I want to give

Paul Thurrott [01:17:31]:
them that, that sort of Microsoft focused approach to this, which I think Richard will appreciate is that is the case many times Microsoft was actually kind of onto this pretty early. If you think about what Loupe was is one of the ideas there is that you can, you can move to this new thing and use this as an app if you want, but you can also use these components anywhere, including where you are now, and then take it even further back. I mean the idea behind one of the ideas behind Microsoft Teams, the other one being let's kill Slack, was that we have this ecosystem of whatever and we know that people today in our ecosystem are using, they live in mail, they live in Outlook. This is the center of their world. But there are these younger employees who look at this thing like it's grandpa's Oldsmobile and they're not interested in this. And so instead of forcing everyone just to move to this new model, we're going to let people do both. And so you could have people working on whatever projects collaborating and the old email guys could do this throughoutlook, the newer young kids, the hipsters, whatever, could do it through teams in chat and do all that kind of stuff. And this is, Microsoft's actually pretty good at this.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:40]:
I mean they kind of saw this. You know, they don't, they don't always nail the implementation maybe or however you want to say that, but. And it's not that the Loop or Team, whatever, Model, Outlook, look, Model has anything to do with AI, but to kind of apply it to the AI era at some point. And then probably two seconds from today, if you spend your whole day in Slack, you'll be doing the stuff from Slack and maybe you're accessing the Notion data source but you're doing it from Slack. You could do it in the reverse direction. You live your day in Notion and you're, you have Slack and you have email and whatever data points because this is your ui. I mean everyone who makes anything related to productivity right now is trying to figure out a way they can be the center of your world and they're all going to in this new AI era and they're going to try to get you to connect to the things you use elsewhere so that you can stay in this thing. And I think that for Notion, what they've done on some level is smart, but the, the goal is still the same.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:38]:
It's like we want you to keep, we want to keep you in notion, you know, and, and the more interoperable you make it, the more possible that is, if that makes sense. Because I'm not sure it makes sense to me, but I think that's what I think. I think that's what I meant to say something, something to that.

Leo Laporte [01:19:56]:
You know, in the PC world we, we had a phase where everybody was building their own machines.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:01]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:20:02]:
And except for you, Richard. Most people realize that it's fine and better, maybe even cheaper to buy a built machine.

Richard Campbell [01:20:11]:
It's cheaper and it has better warranty.

Leo Laporte [01:20:13]:
It changed their own AI era. Now the hobbyists are doing.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:18]:
Actually, that's an excellent comparison. The first PC I owned was one I built. And the reason I built it was because I didn't have any money and that was cheaper. You know, I could use an Intel 386 SX chip and it was cheap,

Leo Laporte [01:20:29]:
you know, and you got to choose everything you got.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:31]:
I had to choose everything. That's the way it was. You know, like I, you go. I mean, I didn't have a good place to buy all this stuff, but I bought a bunch of crap and whatever, I put it together, a computer. And it works somehow I. And that made sense until it didn't, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:20:44]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:46]:
For most people. And you're right, that's exactly what's happening

Richard Campbell [01:20:49]:
with AI building those machines last year, which I'm glad I did. But it costs more. Like they learned anybody who still wants to buy components will pay a premium. And they, they. That's even before the markups hit.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:01]:
I think the last major PC I ever built was for, with and for my son. And I believe he still has it, although it's really probably horribly out of the. But it's a gigantic. It looks like a neck cube. It's humongous. But that was another big. Well, this one was. This one was.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:16]:
Yeah, but this thing.

Richard Campbell [01:21:17]:
Fractal north cases. They're big.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:19]:
Yeah, they're beautiful too.

Richard Campbell [01:21:20]:
They got wood faces and stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:22]:
Ice.

Richard Campbell [01:21:23]:
You pay for them.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:24]:
I don't know how it came up the first time. I'm really confused by that. He later brought it back from college and we took the whole thing apart, cleaned it because it was just full of dust. Put it back together, came up again, and I was like, wow, that's a two for two. I don't know. I don't know how that happened, but it seemed like it worked. It worked fine. I mean it was good, but.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:42]:
Yeah, you don't do stuff like that. I don't know.

Richard Campbell [01:21:46]:
And I finally moved a rolling rack that was the remains of my old house brought here with my old rack mount workstations over to a friend who's still doing that stuff, who was grateful to have it because they're hard to come by now. And it's one less thing in this house which I'm happy to be rid of.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:00]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [01:22:00]:
You know, and I gotta tell you, every time I look at these fractal north cases, like they're very pretty, you know, it makes a difference. Stuff that's nice to look at.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:10]:
Yeah. Did you ever get on the. Are you gonna ever. Are you getting a Steam machine? Speaking of.

Richard Campbell [01:22:15]:
Probably not. I don't play games religiously enough and I'm part of the PC master race.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:19]:
Anyway, like, I mean it is a PC. It's, you know.

Richard Campbell [01:22:22]:
Yeah, I already have one. I have a very nice one. It's got a 5090 in it. Right. Like I'm good.

Leo Laporte [01:22:28]:
Oh yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:29]:
Are you suggesting that that's better than integrated graphics site?

Richard Campbell [01:22:32]:
Now, do I have a dear friend who's an ex Valve employee who lives in wine country and insists that I come and spend a week or so with them every year no matter what, typically when the wine season is on. And we'll certainly have more than one of these because he's that kind of guy, right? Yeah. He's also got the PS5 and the PS5 Pro if you want to compare. So I will get a chance to play on a Steam machine probably this fall.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:56]:
Yeah. I am curious about it.

Richard Campbell [01:22:58]:
Yeah. Well, if you want to go wine tasting, brother, we'll go up there to. To Colonia.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:05]:
I'm not a big fan of wine or gaming,

Richard Campbell [01:23:11]:
but you didn't.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:12]:
Sorry, what are we going.

Richard Campbell [01:23:14]:
So we'll block that out in the fall and we'll go stay up there and we'll play all the video game machines and we'll tell stories of working at Valve and Blizzard and all those fun places. And he's not a big fan of wine, but I keep stocking his wine shelf. So we'll. We'll go hit a few wineries that I like and buy a few bottles and we'll go from there.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:34]:
Few bottles. Yeah, I'm sure it'll be a few. But yes, that'll be good.

Richard Campbell [01:23:39]:
Yeah, that would be fun. It's always enjoyable. They're talking about down here in a couple of weeks for. Because everybody's we have a whole bunch of friends, including my wife and I, whose birthdays are all in July. So we're hosting the big July out of control party which will.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:55]:
Oh, nice.

Richard Campbell [01:23:56]:
On the property. So, yeah, I'm good. I figure we're about 50 plus with the locals included. So trying to decide if I want to. A couple of briskets, a whole bunch of ribs, a whole bunch of salmon. It'll be a good party

Paul Thurrott [01:24:15]:
interestante.

Richard Campbell [01:24:17]:
All right.

Leo Laporte [01:24:17]:
I think this would be a good time to just remind everybody you're listening to Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott from Thurrott.com of course, his books are at leanpub.com, but if you become a premium subscriber@thorat.com, you'd get them all anyway. It's part of the deal. Including Windows Everywhere Field guide to Windows 11 and D and shitify Windows. Richard Campbell is@runasradio.com that's where net rocks. And Runasradio, his two podcasts live. And we are so glad you're here for Windows Weekly and now on with the show. Is it Xbox time?

Paul Thurrott [01:25:00]:
Yeah. And it's, you know, it's a bundle of good news. So we talked about the incoming Microsoft layoffs, et cetera. We don't know how that's going to impact Xbox. We know that Xbox is going to be part of it. You know, the rumors kind of continue, et cetera.

Richard Campbell [01:25:16]:
And by the way, like, considering that normal turnover for a company that size is like 12,000, 13% or 20, 30,000 people a year. Yeah, this is silly. Like.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:27]:
Yeah, so this is literally playing press

Richard Campbell [01:25:29]:
games to talk about a layoff of 5,500 people.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:33]:
Right. So if the rumor is correct, 2.5% of the workforce, which is 5,500 people, it could be less than actually, which is lower than expected. You know, the. I don't remember, I don't remember any numbers, but I mean, I feel like last year there were multiple layoffs and a lot of them were high single digit percentage, you know, so these are, this is smaller. It doesn't mean it's the end of it. Right. This is the problem.

Richard Campbell [01:25:57]:
They seem to now had a routine policy.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:01]:
Yeah, but, yeah, but you know, for Xbox specifically, it's not just like we're losing people from teams. It's, you know, this is a vast collection now of game publishers, game studios, you know, designers, programmers, you know, game makers of all kinds. Right. Game titles, game franchises, you know, and a lot of these things are up for grab. And this is the problem. So we're kind of, we're waiting for the. To see what happens where we have this hope that at least in some cases that Microsoft can do the right thing, so to speak, by letting those employees, those teams, those studios even leave and go on and continue the thing they were doing. Maybe.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:46]:
And this is the type of, this is the weird, this is kind of weird financial part of it. Obviously these things are assets of whatever kind and these things being games and franchises and so forth. But if you're just going to cancel and stop doing the thing, is it harmful to let the people who are working on that thing just take it and run? Does that make any sense on a spreadsheet somewhere? I don't know. And maybe it's a case by case thing. We'll see what happens. There will be acquisitions. Other companies might hire some of these people. Obviously we'll see.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:20]:
But right now it's all kind of up in the air in keeping with the Apple price hikes. It's almost like Microsoft saw the news, was like, all right, let's raise Xbox prices again. They are raising Xbox prices again. So they're discontinuing the high end 2 terabyte Xbox Series X model which they released I think just last year. Currently placed at, priced at $800. It's going away. And then all these consoles are going up by 100 to I think it's 200 maybe or maybe 100 down if you. Depending on the model.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:59]:
So we have Xbox series s in 512 and 1 terabyte configurations and then Xbox Series X in a digital and non digital, meaning there's an optical drive configuration 1 terabyte. And the prices, you know, today are 349 to 599 and will be 449 to 749 starting on August 1st in one month. Yay.

Leo Laporte [01:28:23]:
I just don't know.

Richard Campbell [01:28:24]:
I guess the reason you buy an optical drive is because you actually want

Paul Thurrott [01:28:27]:
to own the game or you have whatever collection of games already maybe, right? I mean, yeah, I was just talking to Brad about this. This is a tough one because anytime you say you make any general statement or digital is better for games like whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, what about, you know, I have this library and I have, you know, they have resale value. I can bring them to GameStop or whatever, sell them whatever, I can hand them to, give them to kids, whatever. Yeah, you know, fair enough. You can't do that with digital for sure. But you know, we've passed the point where you can even buy a game on a disc and then just start playing it. There's always like a day one, you know, there's updates.

Richard Campbell [01:29:02]:
Oh, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:02]:
No, it's just. It's a nightmare.

Richard Campbell [01:29:05]:
The bottom. You make a great point. Just because you own the medium doesn't mean you're going to be able to play the game.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:09]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:29:09]:
As soon as you plug it in, you're going to need patches. And if they took the game down for whatever reason, you're not getting the patches.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:15]:
Yeah. This isn't in the notes. But Rockstar, which makes gta, revealed that there will in fact be retail packaging for the GTA 6. But it's going to be a box with a piece of paper in it. A piece of paper.

Richard Campbell [01:29:29]:
Nice.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:29]:
With a code where you can go get downloaded digital. So this is like. Yeah, we're giving this. So people are putting this out there so grandmothers can buy it for their grandkids and they can give them something at Christmas.

Richard Campbell [01:29:38]:
And that's smart.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:39]:
Yeah, it's a little weird, but okay, Fair enough. Okay. So there's this and whatever. And then I don't think we had any fresh rumors last week. Now we're talking about the possibility that Undead Labs in arcane Lyon, as in Lyon, France, might be among the ones getting pushed out the door trying to figure out who makes what here. Playground. No, Undead Labs was acquired with playground games. Playground games makes the Forza Horizon games lately.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:14]:
4, 5, 6. I think Undead Labs latest game Stated Decay 2. Stated Decay 3 was one of the games they announced in that recent game showcase. Right. As was that genuine game, which might also get under the X. So that's kind of weird. And then Arcane is the. Those guys may.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:32]:
Or at least Arcane. Leon is Dishonored, which is a pretty good series back in the day. Deathloop, which I never played. And Blade, which is the Marvel. Com, you know, graphic novels or graphic comic series. You know, the Wesley Snipe movies. Blade, the Vampire with the Sword. And so we'll see.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:52]:
They're gonna try to get rid of those guys. Probably is. And then also Double Fine, which makes Psychonauts two Kiln and Keeper, I think is the other one. Might be another one. So.

Leo Laporte [01:31:04]:
Oh, they're local. They're here, I think.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:07]:
Well, again, I feel like a lot of these guys will have a future, you know, it's just. Oh, no, they'll be fine, you know, like. Well, I don't know. Fine. I hope they're fine.

Richard Campbell [01:31:15]:
But, you know, because they'll either set up a new studio and make something completely original or they'll get grabbed up somewhere. Talented game developers are hard to come.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:23]:
I would like their. That outcome is great, but I would like it to be even better if possible. I'd love to see in some cases if the game IP they were working on could go with them.

Richard Campbell [01:31:34]:
Yeah, it seems very unlikely.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:35]:
I know, but if you're not going to literally ever do anything with it,

Richard Campbell [01:31:41]:
I bet you couldn't even get Microsoft to respond to the inquiry.

Leo Laporte [01:31:48]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:31:49]:
Because there's nobody there who's going to be able to answer that question.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:52]:
So the only little asterisk here is. This is obviously a horrible PR moment. Right. Whenever this happens, this will be bad. If they could soften the blow by just how magnamanious they are, you know, how wonderful we are as a company. We're so great. We think we're Apple all of a sudden, you know, we're just going to do the right thing for the world and we're going to let this stuff go free, you know, free. But go set it free, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:16]:
However you want to say it. It's not going to be every case. It probably won't be any cases. But I still think there's an opportunity. Opportunity there. I wish they would take advantage of it.

Richard Campbell [01:32:25]:
The question here is, when you buy a company, especially a game company, what are you buying? Are you buying the titles? Are you buying the people?

Paul Thurrott [01:32:36]:
Yeah, both. Right. I mean, and maybe, but. And maybe the thing you thought was the reason ends up not being the primary benefit.

Richard Campbell [01:32:44]:
Always. The question is, now that I've laid off the team, could I actually restart the game?

Paul Thurrott [01:32:48]:
Yeah, well, this is the. The opposite of this was the, you know, came out of a question somebody asked me, which is why. Why wouldn't Microsoft, you know, Sony's failing with Bungie. Why not just bring them back in house? And it's like, guys, it's been like 10 years longer. I think there's a whole company inside of Microsoft that used to be called 343 Industries, that's now called Halo Studios, that is probably hundreds of people have been working on this thing. They have transitioned to a new gaming engine that is not the old Halo engine.

Richard Campbell [01:33:16]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:16]:
And now you're saying we're going to bring back those people from yesteryear and try to integrate them into this. There's no way, you know.

Richard Campbell [01:33:26]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:26]:
There's no way.

Richard Campbell [01:33:28]:
Well, that therein lies again. So you may. And so I would argue it's not even the games you've bought or the people. It is the title and maybe the art. But even then you're going to rebuild everything. If you started.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:46]:
These are. You're. Yeah, you're buying. Yeah, you're. It's the, these are assets essentially. Like you're.

Richard Campbell [01:33:51]:
Yeah, yeah, but, and here's the bigger question is at what point do your shareholders get angry with you? Right. You paid x many billions for that company.

Leo Laporte [01:34:02]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [01:34:03]:
You know, what did you buy? Like what did you turn that into?

Paul Thurrott [01:34:06]:
Microsoft spent 7 point whatever billion dollars on Nokia and ended up having to write it down, I think was the term used at the time. That's a lot of money.

Richard Campbell [01:34:15]:
Question is, when is it a write down?

Paul Thurrott [01:34:16]:
Right. But Microsoft spent $69 billion in Activision. Now that's not in any danger of being written down. I don't mean it like that. But the stakes are a little higher here.

Richard Campbell [01:34:26]:
And they have World of Warcraft cash flows. They have a whole bunch of cash flows that are making money off of that right now. Not $69 billion worth, mind you. Like that's.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:36]:
No, but it makes the AI economics look a little more, even more ridiculous or it looks better compared to that at least. I mean it's, there's, there's, there is value there. I, I just, you know, you, you risk completely screwing up your relationship with the community.

Richard Campbell [01:34:53]:
You know, I think that one's flun.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:57]:
Yeah, okay, maybe it is.

Richard Campbell [01:34:59]:
Right? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:59]:
Okay, fair enough.

Richard Campbell [01:35:00]:
The real question here, I'm not, I'm not even, not even debating whether they're going to serve the community well. Right. Or they're going to serve the product well. I'm not going to talk about that. At what point do the shareholders actually get angry? At what point do you actually have to call it a write down? What do you have to get rid of? And this is what I'm saying, they're never going to let the IP go because that's the COVID for not being a write down.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:22]:
Okay? So I 100% you were. I agree with you. I. Microsoft just like, like Apple's not going to not raise prices because that's the right thing to do. You know, they're a company, not a charity.

Richard Campbell [01:35:38]:
Not a charity.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:38]:
Microsoft, however, is in a, is in kind of a weird place right now where they might do the right thing for the wrong reason. You know, in other words, just like for example, we don't exactly know why Microsoft is trying to fix Windows 11 right now, but we have theories. One of those theories is that they actually need this thing to work correctly themselves because they're doing this whole agentic AI thing, and this actually has to work and it's a selfish reason, but they're trying to, you know, they're pretending to actually pay attention for change. And you know what, we still benefit from it on the other side, right? As users of the thing. So as gamers, as Xbox fans, as whatever it is, we're fans of individual games or studios or whatever, if there's some version of this where they end up doing the right thing and it's only for some PR moment that maybe saves their market cap a little bit on that day or whatever it might be, I will take it just to have the victory that accompanies. We'll see if that is what happens.

Richard Campbell [01:36:36]:
Now, I can imagine, because I've worked with folks like this before. A good team being dumped by one of these large corporations reforming, and then they've got to decide, are we going to write something new or are we going to try and take IP from this big end?

Paul Thurrott [01:36:51]:
Yes, yes.

Richard Campbell [01:36:51]:
And there's a game you play there. You do what Miguel and Nat did with attachment, right? How do they get mono and so forth? It's like, make us a deal to license this to us so we can do something with it which you're going to do nothing with so you don't surrender the ip. It's just a license. Or we're going to build the alternative without you.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:10]:
I made my own little world. When I was leaving Penton, I went to my boss and told her I was leaving. And I said, I would like you to give me the super site for Windows. Just give it to me. And they're like, why would we do that? And I said, because I'm driving. I think it was at the time, 40 something percent of the traffic you're getting@windowsitpro.com was coming through my site. So I will just continue doing that. And that would be the agreement.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:35]:
I don't pay you any money, but I'll just drive the traffic. And she was like, oh, that actually makes a ton of sense. She's like, I'll throw it up the chain or whatever. And it went up through three levels and everyone thought it was a great idea. Then I got to vp. Whatever his name, it doesn't matter. I'm not going to name the guy, but talk to him on the phone. And he was like, yeah, no, we're not doing that.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:53]:
That's an asset. And I'm like, yeah, I understand. He's like, no. He's like, this is worth like a million dollars. I was like, all right, goodbye. And. And then they stop using the brand and the URL and, you know, like. Like months later, you could have just.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:10]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:38:11]:
Just.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:11]:
People make bad decisions, you know, I. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:38:14]:
I.

Richard Campbell [01:38:15]:
No, no. I mean, he made the right decision for him because he had to say to the board why he did it. And it's the same problem. Better to let the asset rot than make it valuable somewhere else.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:24]:
Yeah, that stinks. But.

Richard Campbell [01:38:25]:
And that's. I swear to God, that's the same situation with these products. Plus, I also know gamers well enough to go, they'd rather write something new.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:32]:
Anyway, I was thinking that, as you were saying, and I feel like for a lot of these people, and it was pace by case, but you'll have some team of game makers working on whatever titles, and now you're laid off and your game is not happening and it's going into limbo and there's nothing. And you're like, look, we love working together. We're going to keep doing this. And it's like, you know that thing we've been talking about, you know, over dinner?

Richard Campbell [01:38:52]:
We always had a game in their pocket.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:53]:
Yeah, I. I do think there's going to be a lot of that.

Richard Campbell [01:38:56]:
And there's no game better than the one you haven't written yet because. Sucks.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:04]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [01:39:05]:
Right. Like, that's always the perfect game. So. Yeah, that, that's the reality is when those folks get together, they're going to. They're going to take on one of the things they always wanted to make.

Leo Laporte [01:39:17]:
We did the same thing. We briefly had this thought that it'd be fun to have the old Screensavers shows. I did 25 years, of course.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:24]:
I mean.

Richard Campbell [01:39:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:39:25]:
On our network. And it'd be fun to show the old show from like, 2000 and say, here's what's changed in the last 26 years.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:31]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:39:32]:
And so we went to NBC because they own, you know, Comcast bought it and they own the rights and they said no. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:39]:
Because they're like, A, we were never doing anything with this. B, we just discovered you want to, like, get something. Oh, it must be worth something.

Leo Laporte [01:39:47]:
We said we'd do a red show. Yeah. Screw you.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:49]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:39:49]:
You know, they have the tapes. Well, at least they did. Stored in some storage locker in LA somewhere. They're paying a monthly fee for it.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:56]:
I don't know if you follow the news, Leo, but maybe not.

Leo Laporte [01:39:59]:
Well, I don't know who owns it now. It's all very confusing. Comcast is trying to spin off NBC, but that's when I thought maybe we could call them again once they spin it off. Maybe they'll be more interested. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:11]:
Look, we just want to hold a bucket as you dump the trash. Can we just have the. You know. Yeah, yeah. And they said no, right?

Leo Laporte [01:40:17]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:18]:
They didn't even, like, high. But they didn't even say, yeah, you can have it, but it's gonna be $35 million or something.

Leo Laporte [01:40:23]:
They didn't.

Richard Campbell [01:40:24]:
Yeah, they.

Leo Laporte [01:40:24]:
I mean, they could have said. They could have said, well, we want this, and we would have at least negotiated.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:28]:
But it's so short.

Leo Laporte [01:40:31]:
Trouble. Yes. We don't. So who knows? Those tapes are probably all long gone now. You know, a lot of them have been pirated and put up on YouTube. You can see a lot of old episodes. YouTube. But it would be nice to have the original masters.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:45]:
Of course. Of course.

Leo Laporte [01:40:46]:
Put them back up with commentary or not, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:50]:
And obviously, you're the ideal outlet for that. I mean, it's.

Leo Laporte [01:40:54]:
Well, this is what happens when you don't own your own content, right?

Richard Campbell [01:40:57]:
Yeah, right.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:59]:
Right. That's right.

Leo Laporte [01:41:01]:
It's one of the reasons I started Twit way back in 2005, because I had that bad experience with tech TV and I said, you know, I could probably do the same thing in a. And it's like, I feel like I'm like Taylor Swift. I wanted to own my masters.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:16]:
That's interesting. So this is what you're saying is that Twit as a. As an organization is tech TV Leo's.

Leo Laporte [01:41:25]:
Leo's version. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:26]:
Is that what you said? Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:41:27]:
You nailed it. It really is. Just.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:30]:
Just trying to make sure I understand.

Leo Laporte [01:41:31]:
It really is. We didn't get the masters, so we thought we'd start over.

Richard Campbell [01:41:37]:
There you go.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:38]:
That's funny.

Leo Laporte [01:41:38]:
Unfortunately, I don't remember the melody, so.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:41]:
Right. I guess that's technically what Thorat.com is as well, but.

Leo Laporte [01:41:44]:
Yeah, it is, right? It is.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:46]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:41:47]:
And you know what? You did just fine. You did.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:50]:
You know what, though? You did too, by the way. I feel like both of us probably would have just done the thing forever if they had just left us the frick alone.

Leo Laporte [01:42:01]:
Exactly. You know, in a way, that kicked me out the door.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:05]:
Right. Because I would never have had the incentive. I never would have done it. I never would have done it. I was happy to be there, you know, and it just. They made it so awful and terrible and, you know, whatever. They made it impossible for me to stay, but I would have just stayed.

Leo Laporte [01:42:21]:
Travis, Kelsey and I are engaged

Paul Thurrott [01:42:25]:
in the marriage. You're going to move the wedding location of the Giant Stadium.

Richard Campbell [01:42:29]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:42:31]:
That is so funny because we spent a long time yesterday on MacBreak Weekly talking about that and people were very irate. Like, I don't tune into this show to find out what's happening with Taylor Swift.

Richard Campbell [01:42:41]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:42:42]:
But.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:43]:
Well, that's. But they do tune into this show to find out what's happening.

Leo Laporte [01:42:46]:
That's why they listen to Windows Weekly. Exactly. That's what I said. Tune in tomorrow. We'll cover.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:51]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:42:54]:
I should actually though, I love these little discord real quickly because get these great illustrations from Joe Esposito. He does these, by the way. Not with AI. He does these.

Richard Campbell [01:43:09]:
He does the old fashioned way.

Leo Laporte [01:43:10]:
He does the old fashioned way. The Photoshop way. And I don't really know what's going on here.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:15]:
Is this like an 80s thing? It's like Indiana Jones.

Leo Laporte [01:43:18]:
What's the little Michael Jackson looks like?

Paul Thurrott [01:43:23]:
Yeah, but the tiny Mary Lou Retton.

Leo Laporte [01:43:26]:
And then Mary Lou Retton. There you go.

Richard Campbell [01:43:28]:
She did new rings.

Leo Laporte [01:43:29]:
That's. That's.

Richard Campbell [01:43:29]:
That's men.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:31]:
Okay, well, I'm thinking 80s, you know, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:43:34]:
I love. What do they call that font? That? The font. The checkbook font at the bottom. I love that too.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:39]:
That's like the Byte magazine font almost.

Leo Laporte [01:43:42]:
Anyway, thank you. Joe Ozarn, Art Foundry. He is. He takes old computer ads and turns them into.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:49]:
Yeah, awesome.

Leo Laporte [01:43:51]:
All right now, back of the book Time. Mr. Paul Thurrott for us probably actually

Paul Thurrott [01:43:57]:
have all those outfits.

Leo Laporte [01:43:59]:
I do actually. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:01]:
So Dave Plummer, former Microsoft engineer. He's just here for the likes and the subs. Whatever. I. Look, I subscribe to his channel. I actually love the guy that has apparently not been pointed back in my direction. It's fine.

Leo Laporte [01:44:17]:
He doesn't even know who you are. Come on.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:19]:
That's what I mean. Which is. Like I said, it's fine. It's. But. And look, I watch every video he makes. I just, you know, it's my thing, you know, I disagree with it. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:31]:
And part of the problem is I don't. He almost never does anything that helps anybody. Like I. What I mean is, like if you're tech enthusiasts, you're a developer especially you're technical, whatever it is, you're older because you remember all this stuff from the 90s. Same reason you would read like a Raymond Ch Chen post on what used to be MSDN. Because he's just talking about APIs. And programming things from 20 years, 30, 40 years. It's crazy.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:57]:
It has nothing to do with anything. And if you enjoy that kind of thing, you're going to love Dave Plummer. I really find it interesting. But there's also. He makes YouTube videos. So there's a clickbait kind of element to some of this stuff where I'm like, what? He just came up with videos like, tired of bloated Windows, I fixed Notepad. And I'm like, again, like, you fixed it again? Like, what does that mean? So I watched this stupid thing and he, look, he already. He did this last year sometime.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:28]:
He did some vibe coded version of Notepad, which is pretty good, by the way. But he's been working and some other people have been working on like, assembly language, like OG Notepad style. Like OG. Well, not OG, but like 1990 style Notepad, whatever. And like. And then it turns into one of those programming challenges where it's like, how small can we make this thing? You know? Well, it turns out you can. They can make it in 2.5k, which is like, you know, which because of cluster sizing on disk, is actually 4K. There's nothing you can do.

Leo Laporte [01:45:57]:
Right?

Paul Thurrott [01:45:58]:
I mean, it's like stupid big. And by the way, that's fun. That has nothing to do with fixing the bloat. Your perception of bloating in Windows, whether that's real or imagine, bigger than that. Yeah, every MP3 file is 100 times bigger than that. But what does this solve? Okay, are you going to now go to every single application in Windows and remake them as tiny, whatever, kilobyte, assembly language, executables? No. And also, if you try to run this thing on your computer, you're going to get a smart screen warning, because guess what? It's not, you know, and I don't quite understand, like, what are we talking about here? Like, what is the point of this? And one of the things I see a lot out in the world right now and one of the things I have to really try to repress in myself is just like this nostalgia thing, right? That, you know, I joke, I joke, but I'm not really joking. I talk about, like, how hipsters, hipsters, as I define it, are people who are nostalgic for a past they did not experience.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:57]:
It's like when you have young kids, you're like, I'm going to listen to vinyl, I'm going to have an ipod now. I'm going to, you know, have an instant camera. Instead of using smartphones and online stuff. And whatever. And it's like, yeah, are you. I mean. But, okay, but look, I live through all this stuff like. Like you guys, I was part of the original generation of people, had home video game consoles, home computers, as we call them at the time.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:18]:
I grew up with this stuff. Right. I've seen the world evolve. It's mostly better. It's not always better. You know, we talk a lot about that, but nostalgia, I mean, look, I have my points in time where things were better, but I mean, I feel like it doesn't have to be technology, but most of the time where nostalgia for something, it's not because that time was better. The 1950s were not better than today. The 1980s were not.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:41]:
Well, the 1980s were better. But the thing is, it's mostly because of the age you were at the time. The reason it was better in the 80s for me is because I didn't have any responsibility. I didn't have kids or a wife or a car or a house and a mortgage and whatever. It. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I just live day to day.

Leo Laporte [01:48:00]:
Who cared?

Paul Thurrott [01:48:00]:
You know, the whole world was wide open for me. Yeah. And you know. Yep. That's what. That's what you're really nostalgic for. You can't recapture it. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:10]:
This was a couple of months ago, probably, but I had written that article about, you know, what we've kind of what we're missing in this modern world. And I was comparing, you know, you have a Commodore 64, you turn it on as a basic prompt. Well, it says ready, but it's a basic thing. And you can make your own programs. You're like, oh, my God, what am I going to make with this thing? And how. We don't really have that today. Technology is so easy. It's just there.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:30]:
It's not easy, but it's just there. It's everywhere. And then I finally realized, two, three weeks, whatever into this, that AI is the thing that can give us that for all the problems of AI, the ability to make things with AI is rather astonishing and is kind of the modern equivalent of that thing that. And that's kind of the point. Like, AI is nuanced. It's causing all kinds of problems. We just talked about a bunch of them. But it also has these things that are good.

Leo Laporte [01:48:58]:
By the way, just came back. Fable is now.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:01]:
Oh, there you go.

Leo Laporte [01:49:05]:
And they're going to give us less than a week to play with it.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:10]:
Well, get going, man.

Leo Laporte [01:49:12]:
I hope that's enough time to rewrite the entire Twit sales system. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. But, yeah, right now you can use up to 50% of your plan's usage limit on Fable 5.

Richard Campbell [01:49:24]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:49:26]:
I have a subscription. So, yeah, I will switch to Fable. Very exciting. Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but that's just breaking.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:36]:
I actually kind of figured it would happen between now and where. Whenever we talked about it and the next show. I figured that was the time frame.

Leo Laporte [01:49:42]:
Of course.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:43]:
Anyway, look, I think the thing that bugs me about this is just the way it's promoted. Like, you've solved some kind of a bloating problem. It's like, I'm. Like, I do months and months of work to try to fix these things for people. Trying to. You know, there are entire categories of things I don't even care about personally, but I just go down these kind of rabbit holes because I want. You know, whether you're watching the show or the. My other podcast or the read my site or my books or whatever it is, it's like, I'm trying to help, you know, I'm not just trying to, like, just, like, you know, eject content out in the world.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:16]:
And it just kind of. It just bugs me. Like, if you're not gonna. If you're not helping, like, just shut up and get out of the way. Like, what are you doing? Like, you just. It's worse than doing nothing, you know? Like, you're in to me, when you're making noise, you're distracting. You're just in the way. It's like, are we gonna give fuel to more people to complain about? I can't stand Windows anymore.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:37]:
All it does is sell me stuff all day long and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, I don't think anyone uses Windows more than I do, and that is not my experience. What are you talking about? I see things. I mean, there are things, but I mean, like. But I also. I look at that and it's like, all right, how do we fix this problem? And that's what I try to do, you know? I mean, I'm not perfect. I'm actually pretty terrible in many ways. But, like, I just see something like this, and it bugs me because I like this guy.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:00]:
I'm into this kind of content. I don't think it's anything any normal person would ever care about. But it's like, you create this tiny notepad thing, and you're like, okay, the thing he complained about a year ago, that led to him vibe coding a new version of Notepad and then made this new. This yet newer version was. There was a copilot icon in Notepad which you could remove yourself easily and is now no longer there. So it's like, what, what are we complaining about? I don't understand this. There's nothing in Notepad that is modern that you cannot get rid of with the exception of one thing, which is the tabs, right? That's it.

Richard Campbell [01:51:40]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:41]:
And you can configure it in such a way that you never use the tabs. So they're there, but you don't have to use them. What are we talking? Is this like we're still complaining about Notepad? This is ridiculous to me. Don't be nostalgic. You know, stupid.

Richard Campbell [01:51:54]:
You better, you better be grateful that Mary Jo Foley isn't here.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:57]:
Why is that? Oh, because of Notepad, right?

Richard Campbell [01:52:00]:
Yeah, that's true.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:01]:
I wouldn't have been, I wouldn't have

Richard Campbell [01:52:02]:
been brave say such a thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:04]:
I wouldn't have said that in her, in front of her. No, I, I. The bone. I would always. Well, the bone I would give anybody, and including Mary Jo, is that in, you know, the modern version of Note, by the way, Notepad as a. I'm sorry, let me find, Let me, let me find the window so I can get the exact number. I talked about how small his version of Notepad is. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:25]:
It's pretty full featured. Right. 2.5k on 2,5k. It's really 4k on disk because of the cluster thing. The modern version of Notepad, by the way, is 332K. I mean, yes, it is exponentially bigger than his thing, but it's also 332K. It's not Photoshop.

Richard Campbell [01:52:44]:
Guys still got an icon bigger than that.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:47]:
Yes. And there's also this thing that most people don't know about in Windows, which is that Notepad is, in fact, I should say the classic version of Notepad is still in Windows 11. It's in the sys32 file, you know, system32 folder in Windows. Right. It's a. I'm forgetting the term now. It's a. Let's see if I can figure out the term of this thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:13]:
It's an execution alias. So the actual Notepad is the old version. If you turn off in Settings, you go to App. Advanced app settings. I think it's app execution aliases. You can turn it off in Notepad and it runs the old one. It's still there. What are we fixing? You could do all this stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:33]:
What is this? This is Not a bloated. It's not terrible. Do you actually use notepad? I use notepad every day. I love it.

Richard Campbell [01:53:40]:
Sure.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:42]:
Jesus. It's crazy to me. Don't be nostalgic for something that was. Is not what you think. It was like.

Leo Laporte [01:53:49]:
We.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:50]:
I think as people, we just kind of remember the good thing, you know. So we have this like, oh my God, everything was better, you know? Yeah, everyone used to smoke on planes in the 80s too, by the way. That was not better.

Leo Laporte [01:53:59]:
Those were the days, huh?

Paul Thurrott [01:54:00]:
That was not better. One of my favorite I was. This was a business trip. So that long. I mean that recently, so to speak, I was on. I had. I booked a ticket for the non smoking part of a plane and it was the row in front of where smoking started.

Leo Laporte [01:54:14]:
Isn't that ironic? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:15]:
Like what? Yeah, okay.

Leo Laporte [01:54:17]:
There is no non smoking on a plane where they allow smoke.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:20]:
Guess what? I'm not nostalgic for that. That's ridiculous. And I recently I've been updating the book, you know, on and on and on and one of the ones I get stuck on things. This is my problem. I always find these, like I have to. Okay, wait, what about. And then like a week goes by, like what have I done? Nothing. Except I've spent a lot of time doing it.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:43]:
And one of those things was it's like a consolidated Xbox chapter which is like Xbox, PC plus, whatever the gaming stuff is. Right. So there's, you know, there's the Xbox mode which is new. There's the game bar which is not new. And the Xbox app. Right, of course. And then you could do with the controllers, etc. But I wanted to address in some small way like Windows 11 unarm gaming.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:06]:
And this fell into the review I just talked about of that laptop as well, where this thing has the most powerful processor. Like how can I make games run? Or probably really just run better? Because I don't know that I can do anything to run games that won't run, Whatever. So I actually tried all these games and I tried different Call of Duty games. I went back to Vanguard and none of them. They don't even. You can spend all day installing this thing and then you run it. It's like, yeah, no, it's just not even gonna run. Like it crashes immediately.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:36]:
It's unbelievable. The late like the. The modern Doom series, like the Doom 2016. Doom. Eternal, whatever the second one was called. They run, they're fine. The mock, the newest one, Doom Dark Ages does not run. It's same thing stalls, takes A while crashes immediately does not run.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:55]:
But in going through this little escapade or whatever you want to call it, this is not new information per se. But if you are going to try to make anything work on Snapdragon for games, there are actually three things you need to do. There are settings in system. I'm sorry there are settings in the settings app in System Display. Right. Go into graphics and you can actually determine or configure how. Auto. Super Auto.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:23]:
What's it called? Super. I guess it's Auto super resolution. Auto SR works with individual apps but in this case games, which is smart, you know, you want to make sure that's set up correctly. There are sometimes settings in games you can use in combination with that. Like you can go into a game and say I'm going to run this at a lower resolution but I'm going to use Auto sr and it's going to, you know, visually make it look like it's running at a higher resolution. And that can help. But the best thing to do, and this isn't curiously is not pre installed in all recent Snapdragon PCs is you get something called the Snapdragon Control panel and it works a lot like an Nvidia app would work where you can use it to download drivers and then it will auto configure for individual games. And it does that.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:05]:
And actually this is super smart to have because a especially on Snapdragon, but maybe not unique to Snapdragon. You absolutely have to have the latest graphics drivers especially and that's the way to do that. And then you can go in and individually configure how games work to a degree that you can't just in the system and actually that got some games over the top, you know, like I was playing. I think it's called Tomb Raider Definitive Edition. And the default settings using like Windows and just having the game optimize itself. I was getting 15 frames a second but then when I optimized, yeah, it's not even playable. It was terrible. And then it's great for screenshots, it's not good for playing.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:45]:
But then I went through the Snapdragon control panel and just had it kind of auto configured. Well, it didn't auto configure. I actually went in and made some changes but. And then I went into the game and I just, I lowered the resolution but that ended up bumping it back up. And by the time I was done, I'm still getting. I'm getting over 100 frames per second. When I went down to more than you need way more. And.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:04]:
But by the way, it was, it was in the 270, 280 range when I went down. No, I mean when it started, I was like, wait, what? So I'm like, no, I'm bumping up the visual quality. So anyway, if you're going to go down this path, God help you, you're going to waste a lot of time. But you need these three things. Like you need to look at these three places. It's not just what's in the os. You have to get this Snapdragon control panel, which is a Qualcomm application. It's key to making this work.

Richard Campbell [01:58:32]:
Well, I'm glad we got that now that we can try and optimize like that. These are all luxuries. In Windows you can do a bunch of this, but you just don't really need to. Stuff just works.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:42]:
This is so. This is everything I do. But you know, it's so time consuming and then ultimately usually so disappointing, you know, because some of these games are humongous and then it just doesn't work, you know.

Richard Campbell [01:58:55]:
Yeah, but you also hit me with the reality now just now, which is like they've been making video drivers for Snapdragon XS for two years, right? So they're only so good. Like, we forget the luxury of a mature driver set.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:10]:
Any modern game, if you go in, there are custom settings for all kinds of things like vertical sync and frame filling and all things that are custom tailored to Nvidia AMD and Intel chipsets.

Richard Campbell [01:59:23]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:24]:
And usually dedicated graphics. But increasingly you'll see this for integrated graphics too. There is nothing for Snapdragon. Right. So emulation is bad enough that like, you know, Notepad doesn't run natively on arm. It does, actually, but if it didn't, it would be fine. No one would care. It's a small app, a gigantic game that is big.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:43]:
Graphics moving very quickly, hopefully very hard to do, to emulate, just to emulate all of that. It's a nightmare. And for the person doing it, it is a nightmare as well. Because sometimes it's impossible to know what makes the most difference or whatever. And there's a lot of hit or miss. But that assumes you can even get into the game. It's the one area where this thing kind of falls short. If gaming doesn't matter to you on a PC, you only have to have one PC, it's not a problem.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:16]:
But if gaming very much matters to you, this is not the way to go, unfortunately. It just isn't you know?

Richard Campbell [02:00:23]:
Yeah, no, fair enough.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:24]:
Unless you don't appreciate your time.

Richard Campbell [02:00:25]:
But, but there's lots of people arguing that they're not going to buy our machines because of gaming. And so basically saying it's like, look, you can make it work.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:35]:
The people that somehow you run some esoteric app or something that somehow it does not work on arm, which is like almost impossible to find these days by nature. That person who will never stop complaining about this will inevitably have multiple computers and it does not matter. It's like. Or you have like, I have this printer, like a brother printer from 1992 and it will not print from Windows on ARM and I, thus I cannot have it. It's like, do you have other computers? How much do you print? What are you talking about? Why does your iPhone print to it? Like, what are you talking like, why? Like, what's the why? What's the difference? I don't know, but it's a blocker for some people, you know.

Richard Campbell [02:01:14]:
Yeah, without a doubt.

Leo Laporte [02:01:17]:
Run as radio. Well, it's coming up.

Richard Campbell [02:01:23]:
Well, I'm, I am on a string of security conversations, for better or worse, mostly related to the impact of LLMs on security. Both sides of the equation here.

Leo Laporte [02:01:34]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:01:34]:
Hot Topic, last week's show with Tanya Janka. We were talking about helping developers to be more secure because they are the targets now of the black hats. But this week's show is with Mackenzie Jackson, who focuses more on supply chain attacks specifically and, you know, various mechanisms that are going on there that are creating this problem. And so we were talking about, you know, some of the exploits that have already happened and tools and so on. And just this risk of it's one thing to secure the CI CD pipeline, it's another thing where supply chain attacks typically happen because your internal apps take on new versions of code, typically open source code that have got exploits in them and then you become part of the propagation chain or you're using an application, a third party application that depends on those sorts of things in your place gets affected because it got deployed that way. And as we talk through the challenges of evaluating all this in various testing tools and so forth, McKinsey said this great thing that just hit me so hard, like, wow, what a solution. Which is the white hats are working hard to fix these exploits, but usually it's always post facto. And so if you just wait 48 hours after a new version of a library comes out, if it's been exploited, that will be found and fixed within those 48 hours.

Richard Campbell [02:03:02]:
So it's like, just don't install the new bits, and a whole lot of problems go away. This is such an interesting policy from an administrative point of view to go to your dev team and say, hey, can we do this? Can we just make it a routine that when you go to do a build, you don't grab any bits newer than 48 hours old. It's just a new. It's a new request and something I hadn't considered before. And just the reality that over and over again, where we see these exploits, they get detected. They get detected within hours. Right. Some.

Richard Campbell [02:03:37]:
Some were just a few hours. And even then, enough people had downloaded that there was a whole lot of problems, but the folks who hadn't yet were fine. So if you could just wait, you might fix a whole bunch of problems.

Leo Laporte [02:03:52]:
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:58]:
Well, not all ages, Leo.

Leo Laporte [02:04:00]:
Okay, children over 21. Yes, it is time.

Richard Campbell [02:04:04]:
Not in this country. 19's just fine.

Leo Laporte [02:04:08]:
What is the drinking age of Canada? 18.

Richard Campbell [02:04:10]:
It depends on the province.

Leo Laporte [02:04:11]:
Oh.

Richard Campbell [02:04:12]:
We don't have an overbearing federal government saying, give you highway funds unless you.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:17]:
Oh, look who's coming out of his shop. Shell on Canada Day, it is.

Richard Campbell [02:04:21]:
Oh, by.

Leo Laporte [02:04:22]:
Yes, Happy Canada Day. Canada has multiple reasons to celebrate not merely Canada Day, but the World cup as well.

Richard Campbell [02:04:30]:
Oh, yeah. Still in it. We're all shocked and stunned and thrilled.

Leo Laporte [02:04:34]:
Going on to the round of 16. That's exciting.

Richard Campbell [02:04:36]:
Yeah, very exciting. Furthest we've ever been by far, and. Yeah. 159 years young for. For confederation.

Leo Laporte [02:04:44]:
Nice.

Richard Campbell [02:04:44]:
And I mean, I've been home for a while, so we've been doing. This is the second Canadian whiskey. His previous one was. I was in Denmark, so we were talking Danish. Very good whiskey, by the way. But last week, we did an East Coast. We did Glen Breton. And so I got to tell the story of Cape Breton and just how mad all of that was.

Richard Campbell [02:05:01]:
So it seemed fair that I would go to the west, essentially. And I found I'd been meaning to talk about the Eau Claire distillery for a while, because I'm making my way through these things. And then I found this ridiculous bottle.

Leo Laporte [02:05:13]:
It's got a moose on it. It must be Canadian.

Richard Campbell [02:05:16]:
Yes. The guy who sold it to me said, I hope this isn't AI And I'm like, I'm pretty sure this has been around long. And this is things from 2020. Yeah, I couldn't do this in 2020, so don't worry about that. But look close at the bottom of the bottle. See the Mountain.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:31]:
Is that a mountain? Oh, my God. That's amazing. Mountain in the bottom of the bottle.

Leo Laporte [02:05:34]:
I love it. I would buy it just for the mountain in the bottom of the bottle.

Richard Campbell [02:05:37]:
And the labels askew and torn on the edge. Like, they've got this whole aesthetic going on on this crazy bottle.

Leo Laporte [02:05:45]:
So cool.

Richard Campbell [02:05:46]:
And so this Rupert's exceptional Canadian whiskey. And by the way, the mascot's name is Rupert, but there's more reasons for the name Rupert. And for that, we have to do a little bit of history. And that's what you sign up for when you do this, right? Because this whiskey is made in at a distillery called Eau Claire, which sounds French Canadian, except it's in Alberta.

Leo Laporte [02:06:09]:
Oh.

Richard Campbell [02:06:10]:
But before confederation, Alberta was not called Alberta. It was called Rupert's Land.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:16]:
Nice.

Richard Campbell [02:06:17]:
And you may wonder why in the world anything was called Rupert's Land. Because it was actually named for a fellow named Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who was the cousin of King Charles II of England, and he was the first governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, which is granted control of the British territories in 1670. Until very recently, Hudson's Bay Company was the longest continuous operating corporation in the world. But it eventually became just a department store, and department stores can't survive. And HBC is finally gone. But this was the place that traded two blankets for a beaver pelt for 300 years. And the land declarations. Now you gotta imagine your King Charles ii.

Richard Campbell [02:07:08]:
You've got control, you know about this land, but nobody's really explored it yet. You're not terribly concerned about the native population that's already there, but you want to license it, essentially. So you have to set parameters on a land you don't have maps for. So how do you do this? And so the deal, what Rupert's Land actually was, the way it was defined, was it was all of the land whose watersheds drained into Hudson's Bay. So if you went to Hudson's Bay, which is that huge bay in the middle of the Canadian landmass there sort of off to the east a bit, and you go up any of those rivers, all of those rivers represent Rupert's Land. And there was another territory that they defined as well, called the Northwest Territory. The Northwest Territory was the land that didn't drain into Hudson's Bay because it drained into the Arctic Ocean. So it was north and west of Rupert's Land.

Richard Campbell [02:08:06]:
Now, these territories were defined literally in the 1600s, long before there were colonists. So when you fast forward to Confederation, which was 1867, where Upper Canada and Lower Canada became the Dominion of Canada. Normally, we've now called those Ontario and Quebec, although when Confederation comes to 16 in 1867, and we talked about this last week, you also get New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Scotia. Newfoundland doesn't come along. Newfoundland, Labrador, stay out until 1949. As part of the formation of the Dominion of Canada, both Rupert's Land and Northwest Territory are transferred to the Dominion of Canada. This is in 1870. And so initially, they just call it all the Northwest Territories because it's north and west of Ontario.

Richard Campbell [02:08:56]:
But they also, shortly after that, make an area called Manitoba, which is the next. Today is now the next province over from Ontario. But then it was not that back then, it was the Red river settlement. And the Red river is the river that flows through what we now know as Winnipeg. And at the time, in 1870, it was the largest population of Europeans, nominally Europeans, about 10 to 12,000 people west of Ontario. Now, these were not strictly Europeans. These were many of the original generations of original settlers from the 1600s. These were the Metis.

Richard Campbell [02:09:36]:
And the Metis were the European trappers who paired up with native women and essentially created their own tribe, their own group of folks. The Metis are a very powerful force in Canada to this day. And they were not happy with the deal that formed the Dominion of Canada and turned Rupert's Land into parts of the Dominion of Canada simply because they weren't consulted. And so a bit of a rebellion was taking place there. They basically organized their own provisional government and started communicating directly with the British Crown, which really got Dominion Canada wound up. And so they negotiated quickly and carved out a little chunk of land 200km by 175km, largely around what we'd now call Winnipeg and called it Manitoba just to keep those guys calm. The following year, in 1871, British Columbia joins, and British Columbia comes to Canada a totally different way. Because of the Rockies being so steep, BC Was actually populated by folks coming from the Pacific.

Richard Campbell [02:10:40]:
So this is Captain Cook and Captain Vancouver and that whole dynamic. So it's a totally different process compared to what was actually going on coming from the east. So everything east of the Rockies is Rupert's Land in Northwest Territories. This was all part of that original fur territories that now were being carved up. And so in 1882, the federal government starts dividing the Northwest Territory now into different regions. And the District of Alberta was defined as a what we now would call southern Alberta. There was the District of Athabasca, which is northern Alberta, and then the District of Saskatchewan and Assabune which ultimately all becomes Saskatchewan. There's also the District of Keatin, but that comes and goes in a relatively narrow period.

Richard Campbell [02:11:22]:
It's a negotiating tool for trade and eventually will become the rest of Manitoba. Actually, Alberta and Saskatchewan don't fully emerge until 1905. Not that long ago, really. And that brings us to the Turner Valley. Turner Valley in Alberta is about an hour today is about an hour's drive southwest of Calgary on the 20. But in 1886, so while Alberta was still the District of Alberta Star part of the Northwest Territories, the Turner family settled there to do ranching and farming. And this is right along the Sheep river, which also has a very interesting geological form that captures hydrocarbons. And this is actually where western Canadian oil industry begins.

Richard Campbell [02:12:11]:
Now, oil in general had largely been discovered in the North American continent in southern Ontario and Pennsylvania in the 1880s. And literally it was these similar kind of geological folds that literally that drove oil and gas right to the surface. It could. Yeah. And was long before any sophisticated technologies around any of that. And early surveys of the proto Canadian government that did go through Rupert's land had said that the eastern part of the Rockies could possibly had hydrocarbon formations where literally it was seeping up to the surface. And so into this environment comes a guy named William Stewart Heron and also another guy named Archibald Wayne Dingman. And it's funny how in the early 1900s, everybody concludes their middle names and things, but both these two had worked in those Pennsylvania oil fields in the late 1880s and 1890s.

Richard Campbell [02:13:03]:
And when they had found out that these formations were known in western in Canada, what was now at that point still Rupert's land, they immigrated. And so Heron is considered the founder of the oil industry in western Canada. And he very specifically came there looking for oil, hadn't had some experience there. And he bought a farm near. Bought a farm off of a farmer that was near the river where he saw these seepages and creates the Calgary Petroleum Products Company. In 1913, he partners up with Dingman and they believe they found the same formations that they saw in Pennsylvania that made oil and what they call wet gas very easy to access to. They're wrong. And they will spend 17 months drilling to finally strike what's called wet gas.

Richard Campbell [02:13:55]:
This is not crude oil per se. This is natural gas with heavy components in it. The most interesting, which is called a product, then condensate, essentially natural gasoline stuff you could just directly burn. And the natural gas, the actual gaseous part, they can't use. This is before the Pumping systems and containment systems and so forth. They want the liquid, they can't really deal with the gas, but the gas, if it builds up, it becomes explosive and very dangerous. And so attached to all of these early drilling rigs is a flare which really what it is is they're burning the natural gas off. And as described in the papers in the early 1910s there was so much light at night you could read a newspaper.

Richard Campbell [02:14:44]:
They're not really doing any refining, they're not doing any piping. They're just using the condensates because they're valuable burnable fuels. Right. Snaptha and benzene and those sorts of things. So by the 1920s, the Turner Valley is this frontier boom town. People are flocking, they're grabbing any land they can. Everybody's drilling, things are very, you know, pretty out of control. And In October of 1920, a fire and explosion destroys the entire petroleum facilities that that Heron had built.

Richard Campbell [02:15:13]:
And unable to afford the rebuild, he sells it off to Imperial Oil for a bargain, or Imperial Oil sets of a new entity called Royal Light Oil Company. And one of their first things is to actually build a natural gas pipeline all the way to Calgary. So they stop flaring the gas and start piping it into this quote unquote city. I mean it's, it's the 1920s, so the plagues are still pretty small there. In 1936, Turner Valley Royalties hits the proper crude oil zone and starts pumping real proper oil and starting to do refining. And in fact that whole area becomes the majority of oil production of Canada right through World War II. And this will eventually end by the end of the World War II. The Leduc discovery, which is up much further north, just south of Edmonton, is a far bigger oil field.

Richard Campbell [02:15:59]:
And that becomes the focus. And so the Turner Valley falls into decline. And that brings us up to more current times. So this was a little farming area that became this boom town for about 25 years, 20, 30 years for oil and then largely it subsided. And there's still wells and things in the area, but they're much lower producing and you know, just those times have passed. Now the Eau Claire Distilleries in Turner Valley and here's how that came about. Guy named David Ferran who had worked in brewing, he was a VP for Big Rock Brewery, which is a large craft brewery facility in Alberta. He's also into farming, specifically antique style farming with horses, horse powered farming.

Richard Campbell [02:16:47]:
He keeps big draft horses and so forth. And he was at that time was in the business of growing barley largely for Beer, but doing it with horse equipment rather than the old fashioned thing. And famously him with a group of his friends, they talked about we should start distilling our grains. At the time they were growing kind of barley that worked very well in Alberta called metclaf barley. But they had just announced a new strain made in Canada called AAC Synergy Energy, which was better for making, for doing distillation. It was easy. It had low beta glucan, so it was much easier to mash high concentration of sugar. Today it's the number one malting barley in western Canada.

Richard Campbell [02:17:26]:
But it was just beginning in 2013, 2014. Now there was no craft distilling in Alberta at all. At that time there was Alberta Distillers, one of the largest manufacturers of spirits on the planet. Today they do 20 plus million liters annually. They're one of the big eight distillers in Canada. There's also Black Velvet out of Lethbridge, which is also massive. They really make, they only do their own branded products, but they do more than 10 million liters a year. And we, I mentioned a few shows ago, I was back in 974, we talked about Centennial Rye, which is Highwood out of Alberta, which is not the same school scale.

Richard Campbell [02:18:01]:
Maybe a million liters a year, but still a big, what we call a medium producer. But the laws are not set up for small producers in the 2010s, right? They're built for these bigger producers. They have these expensive markups, essentially excise taxes for any distilled alcohol. And so you pay these big markups. And one of Farron's first initiatives was to create craft distilling law, to get craft distilling law set up similar to what BC has California had pioneered and made its way up to the West Coast, Oregon and Washington and so forth. They don't get exactly the same thing. What they actually get is a discount on the markup or on the excise tax, but not if you sell in stores. You sell in stores, you pay the full markup.

Richard Campbell [02:18:43]:
But if you sell directly or at farmer's markets and you produce less than 240,000 liters of ethanol, so this depends on the ABV, you get a discount and a substantial one can be less than half. And so that means if you're producing a hundred thousand liters a year and it's only at 40%, you're producing 40,000 literature liters of ethanol and you're allowed to go up to 240,000 liters of ethanol. So your actual production limits are about 600,000 liters a year. So they take over this old theater in Turner Valley. It was built in 1929 during the oil boom times. And this is. This building was barely used back in the boom times. It was very busy.

Richard Campbell [02:19:27]:
But at that time it was just sort of a community hall type thing once in a while for events and so forth. It was owned by the town and so far buys it outright from the town to make it into distillery. And it's literally on Main street right beside the 22 highway. He also hires a master distiller out of Scotland, A lady named Caitlin Quinn. One of the very few female master distillers in the world and probably the only one in Canada. She was educated at the Herrot University and she's into that angle on barley because they go after specialty local barley with this AAC synergy barley. Her whole approach is like, let's go for those flavors. Less focus on the barrel.

Richard Campbell [02:20:05]:
Their equipment is small stainless steel mash tons and. And stainless steel washbacks instead of wood. But they do the very long fermentation typical of craft distilleries up to 96 hours. And copper pot stills in the Scottish style. So onion style stills. But they are actually made in Canada. They do age in ex bourbon and sherry casks. So the first distillations happen in 2015 and then they gotta lay up for a few years.

Richard Campbell [02:20:29]:
So they also start making a gin and a vodka to be able to pay the bills. They do the two year old release in 2017. Just a little bit gets scooped up right away because it's just innovative. This edition that Rupert's Exceptional Canadian Whiskey went into barrels in 2015 and was bottled in 2020. So this should be at least five years old. And aging happens pretty rapidly, especially in southern Alberta. That's a. That's a terrain that's got very hot dry summers.

Richard Campbell [02:20:58]:
So sort of like Kentucky and very cold winters. And so there's huge, these huge temperature swings. But always use low humidity means that they battle the loss of water problem. That often their alcohol levels go up but that the draw into the wood is very, very strong. And so you're going to get a rapidly maturing whiskey for its time living in those conditions. And they only lay up about 2,000 barrels right on the facility site there. So it doesn't go very far. This is only 40%.

Richard Campbell [02:21:29]:
So the nose on it's pretty gentle. Not a ton of color in there. But it's not, you know, it's a young whiskey. And they, they say sherry Cask. But I don't think there's a lot of sherry color from this. Oh, all right. Yeah, that's a, that's a. That's a plain old Canadian whiskey, man.

Leo Laporte [02:21:49]:
That's.

Richard Campbell [02:21:49]:
That's straight barley like, you get that. You've got none of the rye notes or anything like that. It's got a nice heat to it, but it's, it's just a straightforward. Nothing too exciting. No, no big burn, this. Just a bit of warm, very gentle on the mouth. Yeah. I call this Canadian whiskey all day long.

Richard Campbell [02:22:09]:
It doesn't do any of those big rich, creamy notes. It's more of a. Just a straight sipping. And at 40 Canadian a bottle. And sorry, not exported, they don't make enough of it. You would not hesitate to put this in a mix or drink it neat, throw an ice cube into it. This is a proper drink for Canada Day. Between the moose and the mountain, you kind of can't go wrong.

Richard Campbell [02:22:33]:
So that's western craft style whiskey and

Leo Laporte [02:22:37]:
it sounds pretty darn delicious.

Richard Campbell [02:22:40]:
Yeah, they made a distinctive bottle. It's got a little taper to it. You know, they've had a little fire.

Leo Laporte [02:22:45]:
I like the mountain in the bottom.

Richard Campbell [02:22:47]:
Yeah, the mountain, the mountain. A very clever idea. Just look at that. Just a little bit of a mold in it. And it's got stamped in here, Turner Valley soil and toil soil. So they are doing that, you know, grain to drain to bottle thing. They're doing a proper craft style and again, relatively small production here, so you gotta, you gotta seek this stuff out. But super Canadian.

Richard Campbell [02:23:10]:
And I thought for Canada Day, a little bit of the west coast story

Leo Laporte [02:23:16]:
and super Canadian, ladies and gentlemen, that's what we call it.

Paul Thurrott [02:23:19]:
Super Canada.

Leo Laporte [02:23:21]:
Well, that's, that's Windows Weekly for this particular July 1st. Thank you so much Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Richard is@runasradio.com that's where you'll find not only run his radio, but also the podcast he does with Carl franklin.net rocks. And that's where the geek outs are as well. You have that new geek out on the data centers, right?

Richard Campbell [02:23:41]:
Data centers of space.

Leo Laporte [02:23:43]:
Space. Lately there's been a lot of talk about what a bad idea data center is.

Richard Campbell [02:23:49]:
I mean, I might have been really.

Paul Thurrott [02:23:50]:
Oh my God. I mean.

Leo Laporte [02:23:52]:
Well, I was willing to give it a.

Paul Thurrott [02:23:54]:
You know, sometimes your knee jerk reaction

Richard Campbell [02:23:56]:
is right, you know, you know, I'm getting. Since I did that talk and it's on YouTube and getting a lot of traction. So is the AI hype talk a whole Lot of people ask me if I do a talk on how to build data centers that don't suck. Oh, just the regular ones.

Leo Laporte [02:24:10]:
Love that idea.

Richard Campbell [02:24:11]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:24:12]:
Don't suck what though? Don't suck electricity. Don't suck water. Don't suck what give you electricity.

Richard Campbell [02:24:17]:
I would say just don't make people angry.

Leo Laporte [02:24:20]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:24:20]:
How about that? Because we built data centers for a long time without making people angry.

Paul Thurrott [02:24:24]:
Yeah. But there weren't so many of them, you know.

Richard Campbell [02:24:27]:
Well, and I also think companies are behaving badly right now. Yes. Because it is. They're. They are. They are doing that gold rush thing.

Leo Laporte [02:24:33]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [02:24:33]:
They are just trying to exploit everywhere they can.

Leo Laporte [02:24:35]:
So come.

Richard Campbell [02:24:37]:
Anyway, I pass it by a couple of organizers and you're like, sign us up.

Leo Laporte [02:24:40]:
So I'm like, oh, God, I got

Richard Campbell [02:24:41]:
to write another one.

Leo Laporte [02:24:42]:
Okay, do it now. That's good. That's good.

Paul Thurrott [02:24:46]:
That's.

Leo Laporte [02:24:50]:
Richard also does those whiskey segments. And if you like them, there are a whole bunch of them.

Paul Thurrott [02:24:56]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:24:57]:
Online at Twitt tv. Whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:25:00]:
And somebody's been working hard. I presume it's Kevin because there's been a bunch of new ones added.

Leo Laporte [02:25:03]:
Kevin's cranking them. He's actually on vacation. He's so exhausted from all of that.

Richard Campbell [02:25:07]:
But we're up to. We're up to Ned.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:09]:
We got.

Richard Campbell [02:25:10]:
I went and re. I watched the Ned.

Leo Laporte [02:25:11]:
Oh, Ned was fun. I was so much fun.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:14]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:25:15]:
That was your Australian story.

Richard Campbell [02:25:17]:
It was one of the Australian ones.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:18]:
Yeah. Wow.

Richard Campbell [02:25:19]:
But yeah, maybe 10 weeks behind that.

Leo Laporte [02:25:23]:
We're catching up. I don't think we'll ever fully catch up, but we're getting there. That's all right. There's plenty to listen to. How many episodes are there? There's hundreds now, right?

Richard Campbell [02:25:31]:
Yeah, 140, something like that.

Leo Laporte [02:25:33]:
Incredible. Incredible.

Richard Campbell [02:25:35]:
Not running out of whiskey, let me tell you.

Leo Laporte [02:25:37]:
No siree. No, no, sir.

Richard Campbell [02:25:40]:
But I'm going to do July 4th in Snohomish, so I suspect I'll be coming back with something American.

Leo Laporte [02:25:46]:
Do they do. Oh yeah. You're going to go for the fireworks, that's why.

Richard Campbell [02:25:49]:
Oh, yeah. Well, this is. This is sort of the rural area north of, you know, King county there, where it's the kind of place where people make their own fireworks. So it sounds like an artillery barrage most of the time. So I gotta go and just have so much fun.

Leo Laporte [02:26:07]:
Yeah. They blowed up good. They blowed up real good. I bet you have fireworks in Makunji.

Paul Thurrott [02:26:13]:
Oh, my God. There's pop up fireworks stores everywhere here. If you want to kill yourself. Pennsylvania is a great place to.

Leo Laporte [02:26:18]:
To be or at least blow off a finger or two.

Paul Thurrott [02:26:21]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:26:23]:
I don't.

Richard Campbell [02:26:23]:
Was it Pennsylvania?

Paul Thurrott [02:26:24]:
It might.

Richard Campbell [02:26:25]:
I don't know. It's Pennsylvania or Tennessee where we on one of the road trips we stopped at a place that had. Was a gas. It was gasoline.

Paul Thurrott [02:26:32]:
Yeah. And fireworks.

Richard Campbell [02:26:33]:
Ammunition and fireworks.

Paul Thurrott [02:26:35]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:26:35]:
I'm like, this is a perfect combination. Yeah. And while we're sitting there, a guy in an H1 with the pintle mount for the. For the 50 cal on it didn't have the gun, but he had the Pinto pulled in to get gas too. Like might be in America.

Leo Laporte [02:26:52]:
Mr. Th is@tht.com that's where you'll find all of the goodies. The articles join the premium section and you not only get more articles, but you also get the books. Field Guide to Windows 11, Windows Everywhere. Deinshitify Windows. You can get them yourself, of course, if you Want to. @leanpub.com now we do this show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live.

Leo Laporte [02:27:18]:
If you're in the club. Of course, you've get behind the velvet rope access in the club Trip Discord. But the unwashed masses can also watch live on YouTube, Twitch X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. And they're really unwashed at X. If you really want to want to hang out with the unwashed masses, X is the place to be after the fact. On demand versions of the show are available, audio and video at the website, Twitter, TV. WW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly.

Leo Laporte [02:27:46]:
And of course the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You get it automatically that way the minute we're done, which we are. Have a great fourth of July. Have a great first of July, Richard. And a Fourth of July, you get double fun. Do they do fireworks in Canada or just.

Richard Campbell [02:28:03]:
Oh yeah, but in a much more controlled way?

Paul Thurrott [02:28:08]:
Well, everything's a little saner in Canada.

Leo Laporte [02:28:11]:
Yeah. We used to have here in Petalumas what they called safe and sane fireworks, which means they were boring, but they still thought that was too dangerous, mostly because of the fire danger. So we don't even have those anymore. We just.

Richard Campbell [02:28:24]:
We just have to watch California. The whole place is a tinderbox.

Leo Laporte [02:28:28]:
It is really. It actually is probably wise not to have people lighting things, especially things that get out of control so easily.

Richard Campbell [02:28:36]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:28:36]:
Thanks for joining us, everybody. Have a wonderful weekend. Enjoy the World cup and we will see you next Wednesday.

Richard Campbell [02:28:44]:
Play in Morocco next.

Leo Laporte [02:28:46]:
When is that?

Richard Campbell [02:28:47]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:28:48]:
US plays today. We're. We're.

Richard Campbell [02:28:50]:
Yeah. You guys are still doing your 32? We did our 32 first day.

Leo Laporte [02:28:53]:
We're hoping we can see survive Bosnia. Herzog.

Richard Campbell [02:28:57]:
Tough game, man.

Leo Laporte [02:28:58]:
Tough game.

Richard Campbell [02:28:58]:
Yeah, I know how to play.

Leo Laporte [02:29:00]:
I know there'll be some celebrations tonight if we do.

Richard Campbell [02:29:03]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:29:04]:
Thank you, everybody. See you next time.